We had a week off from work last week (must go back tomorrow.. must go back tomorrow..) and decided to look for a LCD set. First we went to the cable company to see what they offered, and how it hooked to the set. Then we went to Best Buy. Good thing we knew what we needed, because the salespeople at Best Buy were totally clueless.

However, because of their cluelessness, I decided that I could figure out what I needed and then went to Wal*Mart. I didn't expect them to know anything other than return policies and such, but got a decent deal on a Sony 32" LCD.

We still didn't have the HD converter box from Charter, so we connected it directly to the cable feed. I was not aware, but all of the local HD channels are available on the cable feed. The picture was downright amazing. We watched Law & Order in HD for the first time.

The next day we went back to Charter to get a box, and they had some deal where we had to agree to 12 months, but the price didn't go up. And that's keeping the old SDTV box as well. They wanted to sell us on some deal with free Showtime or HBO or something like that, but we declined. We don't need or want it. Oh, and they gave us a free 12' HDMI cable. Wal*Mart wants $50 for that cable. Best Buy is very proud of their cables. $50 will only buy a 3' cable.

This set is in with the computers in our "office," but we watch a lot of TV in here. I still need to get one for the living room, but it will have to be really nice to draw me away from this one.

One of the "phases" that new HD owner go thru . . . you get distracted by all the picture details so much that you find yourself pausing and going up to the screen to check it out.

- We used to notice on "Friends" that the beer and items on top of Joey and Chandler's fridge would constantly change in every episode.

- Reading the titles on shelved books in different offices on "Law & Order"

Get a rabbit ear if you want the extra over the air HD channels.

Extra?

Unless his local HD broadcast (OTA) channels aren't providing their HD signal to the cable provider, he's already getting them via cable without having to fuss with that ever so attractive bow tie aerial.

Yes, extra the cables companies are not required to carry the additional channels a local example for me is one broadcast channel has its regular feed and 3 additional feeds one of them is a movie channel, PBS has 4 different feeds. The Digital change over is designed to break up the satellite, cable monopoly.

I have to disagree with that notion. Digital broadcasting doesn't solve reception issues where analog reception is poor. It is still prone to terrestrial interference and other problems.

We have the rabbit ears to grab some local HD channels that are not on Comcrap yet.




But Comcrap is getting good with HD. Comcrap has about 65 HD channels now in my area.....




Do you get Discovery HD? Thats a cool channel.

__________________
-Justin

91 560 SEC AMG - other dogs dd
01 Honda S2000 - dogs dd
07 MB ML320 CDI - dd
16 Lexus IS250 - wifes dd

it's automatic.

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.