I live 40 miles from the nearest television towers. The antenna required for air service is not a trivial matter.

I think we get all of the (few) local HD channels for free, but I know that we get a whole slew of HD channels from Charter. And at least for the next year, the HD programming doesn't cost any extra.

And yes, I am standing up to look at the details.

Late SDTV cameras and sets really are pretty good compared to what we had when I was growing up, but they are pushing the protocol to the limit. I don't know if it's just my imagination, but it seems that hockey and football games looked better on SDTV once they started using the HD cameras. As for how the cup playoffs look in HDTV, well, I'm not going back.

I just hooked up another piece of coax to connect the output of the HD receivers to the SD sets (through a switch). I did this because there is often a severe time difference between the regular digital cable channels and their HD equivalents. Sometimes the HD receiver is ahead of the SD receiver, and sometimes it's the opposite. Usually just a second or two, but sometimes up to about fifteen seconds. Walk from the office to the kitchen and you either lose time or hear the prior sentence repeated. It sounds strange, but I fully expected it because the analog channels are not in sync with the SDTV digital channels.