Basic newbie HDTV ?'s (1 Viewer)

[Joe Mollura]

I'm thinking about purchasing a Hitachi 51SWX set and was hoping you guys can help me out with a couple of basic HDTV ?'s

1. Will I notice a big difference if I switch from regular cable (which I have now) to digital cable?

2. Can I run my cable through an HD receiver for better stretch modes (the one thing I don't like about the Hitachi) on 4:3 broadcasts?

3. Can I receive ota HDTV broadcasts just with an HD receiver or do I also need a HDTV antenna?

 

[Patrick Sun]

1. Analog cable is just okay to middling. Digital cable can suffer from pixellation sometimes, but might be more consistently viewable. It's usually garbage in, garbage out. So, YMMV. But once you get HD, you'll think any cable TV feed, analog or digital, will look like crap, I do.

2. It depends on which HDTV receiver you buy. I have the Samsung SIR-T165, and for composite/S-video input, it features 3 modes: Pillarbox, Full, and Zoom. Pillarbox adds grey bars on the sides to reprocess the image for 4:3, Full keeps things as-is, and Zoom just zooms in the image to fill up the screen, but doesn't really stretch it. But others may or may not offer video hub capabilities and only do the HDTV tuning.

3. By definition, OTA HDTV reception requires some form of antenna feed for UHF signals (which is where the vast majority of HDTV channels are broadcast on, only in a few cities will HDTV be broadcast on channel 2-13 - in Atlanta, WXIA (NBC) is broadcast on channel 10, but everything else is UHF, above channel 13).

 

[Joe Mollura]

Thanks Patrick one down two to go.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Joe,

What cable provider do you use?

I recently got hooked up w/ Time Warner here in Brooklyn so I could get some HD programming while I wait for more of the HD locals to return to the airwaves. Never bothered w/ cable before this, and I think Patrick is right. Once you get HD, you won't want to watch crappy cable quality although I'll admit that some of the TWC's digital cable channels look 1/2-way decent and quite watchable some of the times.

Anyway, I would not bother w/ digital cable unless you can get HD service included, preferably at no extra cost.

_Man_

 

[Joe Mollura]

Thanks for your help guys. As far as I know Cablevision on LI is not offering any channels in HDTV, but I will have to contact them to be sure. I will have to check out some different HDTV receivers so see how they convert 4:3 to widescreen.