My first attempt at Digital Television

Unless you've been living in a cave (rather unusual thing to do in the United States, eh?), you know by now that in February 2009 all over-the-air television broadcasts will transition from analog to digital, and some stations have already started dual-transmitting. In fact, in Wilmington, NC all of the TV stations there have agreed to transmit only digitally starting in September 2008. Once the change is made, you must have a digital TV tuner in order to receive over-the-air signals. Newer TV's already have the DTV tuner, but older ones do not, which means that you will have to buy a digital converter box if you wish to receive DTV signals. These boxes aren't cheap, but you can get a $40 rebate coupon from the federal government (2, actually) to purchase one.

Let me put in a little sidebar here: WalMart sells a converter box for $49.99; therefore, you would buy it for $9.99. Best Buy acts like they are doing you a favor by building a big display of their proprietary brand DTV converters and announcing how they will accept the government rebate coupon. Their cost? $59.99. Go to WalMart...

Anyway, I receive all of my television through satellite, so I'm not affected by the digital conversion, but I went ahead and used my two coupons to purchase two converter boxes, since 2 of my 5 televisions are not hooked up to satellite. It takes all of two minutes to hook up a converter box (if you have any experience hooking up a VCR or DVD player).

Want to know what the big issue is going to be? Well, with the current analog signal, using the good old fashion rabbit ears, you can tune in to a channel that isn't perfectly clear and watch the show. You know, maybe a bit of a wave here or there, or maybe just a hint of some fuzziness, or even moderate fuzziness. The point is, you could still watch TV with a crappy analog signal. Not so with DTV. If the signal isn't clear, you are faced with either a jumping, skipping video and audio, heavily pixellated video, or just a frozen screen with no audio or video. This, my friends, is where people are going to be disgusted with DTV. No longer will you be able to tune into a fuzzy picture but still be able to listen to the news or the ballgame. Without a clear signal, you are faced with the same problems that a satellite subscriber faces whenever a heavy storm goes overhead and the picture goes to shit.

On the flip side, if you do get a clear signal, the picture is absolutely perfect, and that is just on a standard definition, 480i television.

I foresee some major growing pains when the change is made.