“What sucks about HDTV” is regular feature on the HomeTheaterFocus Blog that will illuminate common complaints, shortcomings and general misconceptions about HDTV. Of course, we all love our HDTV, but many have shelled out thousands on an HD monitor expecting total viewing nirvana only to find its limitations. “What sucks about HDTV” has its own category so you can compile a list of What Sucks About HDTV!
We’ve heard this story play itself out many times: The average Joe consumer, innocent of truth, hooks up a new $5K HD set to his old satellite receiver with an S-Video cable. Because it’s satellite it’s ALL digital, right? At least that’s what the guy in the commercial says. Behold! The images aren’t as good as they were on the sales floor demo but hey, they’re a darn sight better than what our innocent consumer was used to. Or is it? After repeated viewing our poor Joe consumer convinces himself it’s right. Forget that the wife doesn’t think it looks as good as the old 27” set that was slowly fading away; what does she know? This is a high tech marvel, an HDTV that nearly broke our guy’s bank.
The friends all come over for that big football game, it’s well known Monday Night Football is broadcast in HD. So the guys are sitting in anticipation of being able to see every detail, they want to see beads of synthetic hormones glistening in the sweat droplets of the winning team. Imagine their surprise when they see the aspect ratio has been stretched by the TVs zoom feature to compensate for the grey bars on either side of our new HD consumer’s 16:9 widescreen set. Monday Night Football is rendered in ugly 480i that has been zoomed in to expose a dull lifeless image with every compression amplified. The unsightly picture and poor Joe’s proud smiles play out like a train wreck as one of his buddies informs him he’s not watching HD at all.
Don’t be Joe consumer! If you buy an HDTV you must be aware that your shopping hasn’t stopped yet. Here are a few things you’ll need.
If your new HDTV says it’s HD Ready, that means you need an external tuner to bring in stations from the airwaves. Without the tuner you’ll need either an external HD-Tuner that likes of which are commercially available everywhere. The alternative that most people go for is a subscriber service like satellite TV or cable.
Digital cable or satellite (which is technically always “digital”) isn’t enough to feed your TV a true digital video signal. The digital cable channels or satellite signal is digital to your set top box, but when fed through an S-Video or Composite video cable is reduced to regular old NTSC. A true digital cable or satellite box must have a set of component outputs to provide high resolution images to your TV. Today’s digital set top boxes that come with component will probably be accompanied by an HDMI or DVI output which is also good for a true uncompressed digital signal directly to your TV. Without component, HDMI or DVI all you’re getting is an NTSC video signal to your TV.
Most TVs deal with an analogue video signal differently and many times it depends on settings inside the HDTV’s menu system. A set might automatically try to de-interlace the video from composite or s-video giving an almost acceptable 480P image that probably won’t be bright enough. Sometimes the image will just look horrible. Variation in image quality as you go from channel to channel is common even if you have an HD tuner, not all channels present a perfectly pristine HD quality video image.
If you’re thinking of breaking up purchases to ease the sting of expensive equipment, you might want to consider the TV as the last purchase. The reason is that the digital TVs aren’t as good at presenting analogue images as an analogue TV. Joe consumer’s wife was right, it probably did look better on the 27” TV. If you have a regular cable box and hook it up to an HDTV, you could be in for seriously downgraded image quality. The digital terminal will work just fine on your analogue TV and will feed it great NTSC video. So get the cable box first so you’re ready when the HDTV comes home. Now, the next thing is calling your local cable or satellite provider and telling them to enable the HD networks and then it’s happy viewing.