Crankarm said:
There you go marketing hype again. To see this supposed quality you are stating you need this extra bit, that extra bit and this special box. It's all hype as far as I can see. When I used to watch TV on my small 14" some ad used to come on stating how good this TV or image was. Yes it was, an extremely good image on my current TV, so why waste money changing?
To watch any tv you need tv, source (and if you want to distinguish something to make sense of it) and the actual content. People don't see the comparison because all three are so ubiquitous and cheap (if you're not fussy). Analog tv tuners were built into tvs so as long you have a working aerial plugged in properly bob's your uncle, digital ones are now built into many tvs, even where they aren't after a decade of STBs they are dirt cheap and have been for well quite a while. It's not really any different from having a widescreen tv plugged in to an aerial, a freeview channel that is in widescreen but the content is only 4:3 so it appears 4:3. Or say a classic clip in black and white on a colour tv.
TV technology has changed a number of times - 405 lines changed to 625 lines (and colour), Digital came in in the late 90s, widescreen came in the early to mid noughties on many channels (and later tvs) and high definition is another and 3D where ever that is going, yet another still. If people don't want high definition they'll be fine, freeview HD boxes are backwards compatible so there's no need to kick everyone who'll be on digital after 2012 off onto something else till the early to mid 2020s, unless someone changes their mind which one can never rule out
. Hopefully by then instead of being £150-200 the chips will like in the freeview boxes make those boxes £30.
And I have no complaints with my stuff, my blu-ray player upscaled all those DVDs reasonably well as well as playing blu-rays. The only complaint I think really is that the prices of the hardware haven't dropped anywhere near as fast as people would have liked. Then again the content isn't really there - there are only three terrestrial HD channels as of this moment.