Viewers 'confused' by HDTV

[dangel]

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/05/26/hdtv_confusion/

I found this interesting - especially as I bumped into some relatives at the weekend who thought the same thing - that buying the set alone gives you HDTV..

[SteveCliff]

A friend of mine proudly announced the other day that he'd got HD now too.
I sat him down with a strong cup of tea with plenty of sugar and explained that he may have just bought a HD ready telly but still didn't have HD!

Then telling him the price of getting Sky-HD made him look a little ill!

Oh well, at least he can watch his videos on his 37" LCD now ;-)

[Nick F]

This is the one reason I'm holding off buying a HD set. Once we start getting HD DVD and Blu-ray players here in the UK I will splash out on a nice set.

By this time the price of a great panel will have dropped as well

[Skinleech]

I'll be happy once the market settles on a format & drives for my HTPC are resonably priced. I've pretty much stopped buying films on DVD now, and I'll continue to hold off until such time as the BR/HD-DVD shambles settles down.

As for consumers being confused, I can see why. I doubt the stores are helping either, especially when you consider the analogue with no HDCP sales issue that the early adopters are faced with.

[dangel]

Yup - I'm waiting too - for the next year or so players and Sky HD will be silly money and it's _only_ telly

[Nick F]

Originally Posted by Skinleech

I'll be happy once the market settles on a format & drives for my HTPC are resonably priced. I've pretty much stopped buying films on DVD now, and I'll continue to hold off until such time as the BR/HD-DVD shambles settles down.

As for consumers being confused, I can see why. I doubt the stores are helping either, especially when you consider the analogue with no HDCP sales issue that the early adopters are faced with.

The thing to watch out for are drives that support both formats, these should start appearing soon after the normal drives come out.

Yup - I'm waiting too - for the next year or so players and Sky HD will be silly money and it's _only_ telly

Give it 4 months and I'm sure Sky HD will be half the price it is now

[johnny02004976]

Originally Posted by Skinleech

I'll be happy once the market settles on a format & drives for my HTPC are resonably priced. I've pretty much stopped buying films on DVD now, and I'll continue to hold off until such time as the BR/HD-DVD shambles settles down.

i totally agree mate, im looking to upgrade but im going to once everything has settled down a bit, last thing i wanna do is splash out to find it obsolete in a few months time

[Nick F]

In regards to actual HD panels the standards are pretty much set so you will be okay buying something now as long as you make sure it has a HDMI port.

The only advantage of buying something in 6 months will be the massive price drops.

[directhex]

Originally Posted by Nick Flood

In regards to actual HD panels the standards are pretty much set so you will be okay buying something now as long as you make sure it has a HDMI port.

The only advantage of buying something in 6 months will be the massive price drops.

there are *versions* of HDMI though. most sets bought today won't be able to carry all sound facilities offered by blu-ray, as that requires HDMI1.3, and everything uses HDMI1.1

[Nick F]

Whoops, I forgot about that......

[dangel]

Originally Posted by Nick Flood

Give it 4 months and I'm sure Sky HD will be half the price it is now

Might well be the case for the price of the box itself - i reckon the extra sub won't drop off for a good year tho (when sky+ launched you had to pay 10quid extra a month on top of your sub until (much) later when they waived it if you had two premium channel packages). I think my Sky+ sub costs me too much already - add another tenner to that makes it plain unattractive

Anyway - it's all such a stupid mess right now - a year from now i think it'll make a darn sight more sense than spending the money on something else

[directhex]

i'm waiting for DVB-T2. top-up could have a field day running HD services for a mild fee

[Funkstar]

Never wanted Sky, i'm not at home enough to justify the monthly cost really. But i am warming to the idea of Free To Air or Free To View satelite. DVB-S seems to be gaining ground in the UK which i think is really good news. You can even get a dish and decoder in Maplin for ~£100 (yeah i'm sure it's pants, but still not a bad deal). Also DVB-S PCI cards are widely available and supported too.

Was looking round the Humax site at DVB-T PVR boxes and they have a couple of decent sounding DVB-S (I think one may even be DVB-S2) STBs that can handle HD using MPEG-2 and H.264.

[nvening]

Is HDMI 1.3 different from 1.2a?

[Skinleech]

Originally Posted by Nick Flood

The thing to watch out for are drives that support both formats, these should start appearing soon after the normal drives come out.

I'm sure I read an article, maybe inked from here (?) stating that there would never be blu-ray/HD-DVD combo drives due to technology incompatibilities. Obviously, I hope that's garbage, but there's always the possibility it's not. It's better to assume they will never come out, as then if they do I'll be happy, rather than the reverse.

As for HDMI 1.1/1.2(a)/1.3 - what features do you lose from Blu-ray without 1.3? I wasn't aware of that 'till now. My TV is about 5 months old, and I'm guessing it's 1.1. Things like this put me off the idea of Blu-ray entirely, whether it's the winning format or not.

[directhex]

Originally Posted by http://tomshardware.co.uk/2006/03/24/gdc2006_ps3_no_hdmi/

Recently it was announced that the PS3 will use HDMI 1.3, which will use an expansion of the audio channels and offer Dolby TrueHD as well as DTS-HD. Current TVs generally use HDMI 1.1, which do not support these extensions and create significant audio noise when connected to a HDMI 1.3 device.

:/