Slate: We still want our HDTV [via Slashdot: I STILL Want My HDTV]
[A] friend who recently subscribed to digital cable and bought an HD-ready digital TV set mistakenly thought that he was watching high-definition television. …
The retailer hosed my friend by not telling him what he needed to get HD signals, thus making it easier to sell the TV set. The manufacturer hosed him by not making clear what this fine-print “separate set-top box required” was all about. (Sony and RCA make a few sets with built-in decoders, but they haven’t made a selling point of the feature.) The cable carrier hosed him by not explaining the difference between digital and HD. The local TV stations hosed him by failing to trumpet their own HD transmissions.
As bad luck would have it, our TV broke a few weeks ago. We went shopping at all the usual places, and of course half the display floor is taken up with mind-boggling displays of wall-to-wall HDTVs. The catch? they’re playing DVDs. I think we’ve watched 2 DVDs in the last 8 months. In the store, I finally found an HDTV that was showing the local basketball game live, and it actually looked worse than the tripped-up image-smoothing flat screen (but still very much analog) TV next to it. We still haven’t decided what kind of TV we want, but we’ve ruled out HDTV.
