Introduction
Why you should upgrade
Size considerations, HDTV |
Connectivity options
Design issues
At the store |
All Australian free-to-air TV broadcasters have been transmitting their signals digitally for five years now. Our cable television networks (i.e. Foxtel) have also made the move to digital, so it's natural that if you haven't done so yet, you will be considering upgrading to a digital TV set in the near future.
But don't be fooled -- just because the networks are transmitting a digital signal, doesn't necessarily mean that your home is set up to receive them in an optimal manner. This is the case regardless of whether or not you've got a digital set-top box hooked up.
Sure, connecting a digital TV tuner or a Foxtel Digital box to a regular analog TV will enable you to receive high quality digital signals, but if your TV isn't capable of displaying them, they'll just be converted back to an analog resolution anyway. In other words, it's a waste of money. Therefore, not only do broadcasters have to film and transmit their signals digitally, you must have the ability to receive and display said signals to take full advantage of the technology.
When making big-ticket purchases such as a new TV, it's important to never rely solely on the stores' sales assistants to provide accurate buying directions. A wrong decision, whether it results from poor advice or buyer ignorance, can truly kill your home theatre experience. So listen up. We'll step you through the process and provide the critical knowledge to make purchasing a digital TV a much easier and more satisfying task.
Gregan Curteis
03/04/2006 10:29 AM
I think you should include advice such that no current televisions digital or otherwise will support connections for Blu-Ray or HD-DVD for HD content yet. As many computer users are aware, they'll be forcing us to upgrade all of our hardware if we want to watch a High-Definition version of any HD-DVD or Blu-ray, else the image will be a scaled down version (I've heard mention of 640x480 res?), all due to copy-protection restrictions. Also worth mentioning is that Foxtel digital doesn't support High-Definition, so if you're a Foxtel cusotmer there's little reason to upgrade to a HD-TV at this time. My advice to people would be either stick with their analogue sets for now, or if they *need* to buy a tv, to buy a cheapish (less than $1000) widescreen SD-TV and use either Foxtel digital or a SDTV set top box. At least then they'll be enjoying good picture and audio quality in widescreen. It'll be years yet before 1080i content will be widely available on free-to-air, and it's yet to be seen whether Foxtel will offer HD content at all. And the Blu-Ray and HD-DVD standards war is a good war to stay out of unless you wanna risk being on the losing side. Also if the regulations change and they allow multichannelling on free-to-air then there'll be no HD content whatsoever - you'll be buying your HDTV prematurely as it won't be displaying HD content free-to-air and won't have the copy-protected connections for HD-DVD or Blu-Ray. Xbox 360 in HD can't be THAT good by itself... Best to stick to SD for now and save your money until everything HD is worked out. I'd stay out of the game for the next 5 years at least.
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bleh
11/04/2006 09:57 PM
sadly a HDTV IS required in order to experience the xbox 360 PROPERLY.... the resolution can be (depending on the games)heavily squashed on an SDTV.
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