If Joe Public had "gotten it"... (1 Viewer)

[schan1269]

Or as we say in CE parlance, "stuff way too far ahead".In other words ideas or gadgets that coulda/shoulda stuck around and made the entire industry copy it.I'll start with the Hitachi "media box".Back when, Hitachi had the great idea of selling the ATSC tuner separate from the display (everybody remember the Super Thin LCD and plasma?).You got your thin display (1.5" when everyone else was 3"+).And, if you didn't need it, you didn't have to buy the tuner. The display itself was equipped with 1 of each input. The tuner box upconverted to HDMI if you wanted it to.(at the time HDMI upconversion only existed on super expensive AVR, so your VCR etc could connect to the media box...)Bonus?The tuner box HDMI could go to your AVR, so...it could go with your AVR and eliminate the coax/toslink you would need from EVERY OTHER TV ON THE MARKET.Joe Public didn't get it.But, Samsung(who purchased Hitachi's production capability) brings this idea once again to their UHD sets...again, so they can be stupidly thin.Others?

 

[Al.Anderson]

Sam, I like the video tuner too (I still use two of them), but if memory serves the reason they existed was not to make the TVs smaller, it was because the ATSC format had not been approved. So instead of building in a tuner than may prove to be obsolescent in 1 year, they made them a component that could be replaced. That and so people could use them for analog TV sets.

Most of the other stuff I can think of are things that people shouldn't have bought at all so they stop making out life difficuly -
HDMI: finicky, and doesn't do us any good, just there for copy protection
Digital coax: cheaper and just as good a connection as optical
CD, so you can re-rip forever
HD-DVD (cheaper and more readily backward compatible)
DLNA: because if people used it they might have made even one improvement over the last 6 years and we could have whole house streaming.
I'm feeling angry at "the man"; wait, let me go find Mr Posten!

Oh here's one more in the spirit - plasma TVs

 

[schan1269]

ATSC was adopted in 1998 in its finalized form(John Glenn's return to space).Various cities started their rollouts in 1999, with most major cities having at least 1 by 2004. Indianapolis' major 3.5(Fox had yet to be major...major) were transmitting in 2002.And yeah, HDMI never needed to exist.DVI- D was already around and Sony itself had already tested coax to 8 channels. (Sony knew if they got 8 channels working on coax, Toshiba would shortly have it on Toslink)Toshiba never wanted HDMI. They were happy with Component(their invention as well), DVI and coax/Toslink.Toshiba may get ultimate revenge with HDBaseT (as they knew it was the future...before Sony bought their success from years of butthurt)