Most HDTV owners clueless? (1 Viewer)

[Shaughan]

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/200...237233_F.shtml

 

[Philip Hamm]

I know people who have wonderful 16:9 EDTV plasmas and are as happy with an NTSC cable signal (or even VHS) as pigs in shit. No interest in an HDTV signal at all. It's like buying a Corvette and putting a governor on it so you can't ever exceed 20mph.

People simply do not care.

 

[John S]

I have to say, that thread was scarey....


Those are people that think they are tech savvy too.....



It is filled with wrong information asserted as fact by the posters.


Lesson learned, stay on HTF and stay off Tech Dirt.

 

[Citizen87645]

I'm curious to see how many of them work for a big box store .

I was talking to a co-worker about her new plasma display and she started gushing about how great the local university football game looked in HD. I didn't have the heart to tell her otherwise.

As friends and co-workers are becoming more aware of the technology and looking at purchasing a widescreen display, I'm wondering if I shouldn't organize a sort of Tupperware party for this stuff: give demos, explain the differences, overall just provide some education as they go out shopping. Part of me feels sorry for them because I know it's very confusing and unless they are proactively educated they won't necessarily seek out the information themselves or will just rely on the word of the salesperson.

 

[Dick Knisely]

A very familiar thought. I've had hour+ discussions with several folks in the last couple months to try to keep them from making any silly mistakes. I always try to get them to come here or the DTV.GOV site but I think most don't. It can be very intimidating and very confusing and the cable/satellite companies sure as @#$@ don't help! I wonder if their techs really know the facts or not but they sure are passing out misleading information either way.

 

[Garrett Lundy]

I see they've met my brother. Bought his 55" widescreen SONY in 2003, had never even heard of HD last month.

Me: "Why'd you buy an HDTV?"
Brother: "Whats an HD?"
Me: "High Def"
Brother: "No, I have a widescreen TV, for DVDs and XBox".
Me: "Um, Ok?"

 

[Jay Taylor]

I was in Best Buy a few days ago and watched a saleslady helping two ladies decide between five different HDTVs. Four of the sets were zoomed out to only show about 75% of the picture. One was correctly set. This made four of the sets look like crap and one look great.

I pointed this out to the saleslady and told her how she could correct it. She said that she saw what I was talking about but did nothing & went on with the sales pitch. The customers appeared as clueless as the saleslady.

 

[Duane Robinson]

What I do to people I know who have great HDTVs but supply it with a crappy signal is invite them to my house. When they see the difference between the quality of the image on their TV and mine it does way more than me going into a long discussion on how to properly use their Tvs.

 

[Randall Wetmore]

Yes. In my experience, few people even know they need a High Def box connected via component or DVI to actually receive and display HD content.

I think the logical explanation for this is that virtually all HDTVs readily display 480i and can be easily hooked up the old fashioned way via coaxial or composite with no new or additional equipment needed. People just hook it up the old way, see an improvement in picture quality, and think it's HD.

 

[Joseph DeMartino]

Best Buy folks tend to be pretty clueless. When DVD was new my local BB managed to reverse the cables feeding some of their sets - the one and only widescreen floor model was getting a full-frame movie and stretching it, while the 4:3 sets were all display the tall, skinny image of an unaltered anamorphic widescreen film coming from a DVD player that thinks there's a 16:9 TV at the other end of the cable. When I pointed the obvious mistake out to the nearest blue shirt, he patiently "explained" to me that DVD was a new format and this was how it was supposed to look.

More recently, during one of the shopping trips that led me to buying my 56" JVC HD-ILA, a blue shirt told an inquisitive customer that LCoS was exactly the same thing as LCD rear-projection and that LCoS, SXRD and D-ILA were just marketing terms to make the JVC and Sony sets stand out from the crowd. I told both the sales guy and the customer that this was not quite the case although I wasn't sure about all the details, since at that point I was focused on a DLP set. (Oddly enough it was wanting to understand what differences there were between LCD RP and LCoS that led me to do some research on my own and ulitmately to by an LCoS set. So while often wrong, Best Buy sales people do sometimes prove useful. )

Regards,

Joe

 

[Mike Gillgannon]

I'm absolutely sure there are tens of thousands if not millions of folks who think they are watching HD because "HD" appears in the opening credits -- never mind the fact that they don't have the hardware to receive it, or the harware isn't hooked up correctly.

 

[Ralph B]

people can say what they want about EDTV's but a HD signal over one of these sets look quite nice. I know I like what my Infocus 4805 can do.

my other 2 sets are tube CRT HDTV's (Sony XBR & a Panny) so I am no stranger to a nice HD picture.

 

[Charlie Campisi]

I think another thing that adds to the confusion is that most people are told that bigger sets make the picture look worse because it is bigger, or that SD is going to look bad on an hd set. Conditioned to think it will look different, they don't realize that they are neglecting to do things like use their atsc tuner with an antenna, connect via component or enable the progressive scan on their dvd players that would allow them to get a better picture.

 

[Chris Bardon]

Well, I have a new HDTV, and haven't bought the HD box from the cable company because the deal I have on the SD DVR is too good to give up. If I don't watch a lot of TV that's broadcast in HD, is there really any reason to pay the extra 25 bucks a month for the new DVR? Really, I bought the thing to run the Xbox360, DVD player, and HTPC.

Does this mean that I'm clueless?

 

[Dick Knisely]

Nope, Chris, you got a clue You know when you're not seeing HD so you're disqualified from the clueless list.

 

[Charlie Campisi]

I went through one tv season of having HD programming but only an SD dvr. I'll never do that again. Rushing to catch live programming so that I could see it in HD, while knowing I could watch it on the tivo whenever I wanted was frustrating. Not to mention the times where I got caught up putting the kids to bed and watched the second half of 24 or Lost in HD, then went back to the tivo in SD to catch the first half because I didn't want to give up any of the HD and 5.1 experience. Give me my HD dvr.

 

[Pete Gia]

Just came from a friend`s house to see his new Magnavox 42MF130A "HD" set that he got at CC for XMAS. Was suspicious right away because the price was way too low. Don`t have the heart to tell him even though it has a HD tuner,it`s an ED set. He should have got the Panny ED. Best Regards----Pete

 

[Dean L]

my brother in law bought a 50 inch sony LCD.
he owns a sanyo dvd/vcr combo player.
he only used the RF output for vhs and yes, dvd, because he just thought watching dvd's on channel 3 was the way to go.
so i bought him a set of component cables for xmas.

 

[Travis Olson]

Yes, most people don't have a clue and simply do not care if they have a clue or not. These aren't the people that will tweak everything in their system to make it look and sound better. Home audio and video is not a hobby for them so it gets he least amount of attention to other things in their lives, which is completely understandable. But I say if you're going to spend that much money on something at least know what the heck it is first.

It does piss me off when stores peddle their wares to clueless people when they don't have a clue themselves. Honestly, I can't think of a single time I've walked in to an electronics store where the sales people knew more then me about anything. Not to sound like a know-it-all but that's pretty pathetic. With all the new crap coming out these days it would be in these store's best interest to at least educate their workforce.

 

[DavidMu]

hahaha I got a real kick out of reading this post and I come across this all the time.

The thing i find most amusing is people who go to major department stores which have high overheads because they want to cater to fat wallets and buy their electrical / computer goods.

One incident which stands out is years ago having just bought my first cd burner at 8x, oem version from local pc store for around $100 and being in myer (like jcpenny i think) and seeing a couple buying the creative boxed retail cd burner 4x for around $399 I so wanted to stop them but I let them go..

It just amazes me that these people go to these big name expensive stores because they think they will get the best knowledgable salesman.. yeah right!! these are the same blue shirts who work in your cut-price discount electrical stores who dont when i bought my hdtv didnt really know what dvi was

anyways its just funny when these people are buying the same products at full retail when down the road you could pick up the exact same product for 20% less

my $0.02 worth