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Craig Birkmaier wrote: At 12:00 PM -0500 1/10/07, Manfredi, Albert E wrote: This item is right on cue. The bar has been raised. No one buys bias-plyHate to burst your bubble Bert, but people are buying these second and third sets primarily to watch regular old TV. It just turns out that the sex appeal and wife factor of flat panels that can hang on walls is a huge benefit over a bulky piece of glass. A close friend just replaced a 32" CRT with a 40 inch LCD panel. He did not remark about the picture quality. He DID complain about how heavy that old CRT was, and wondered how he would get rid of the thing. This would have happened anyway, without HDTV. Regards Craig I agree with you Craig about the wife appeal factor of flat panel vs. bulky CRT, but I doubt the acceleration of LCD HD displays would have happened as quickly without the appeal factor of high def. Once the family has gotten used to watching most of thier favorite shows in HD on the main living room TV, every old SD display in the house sucks by comparison, regardless of its physical characteristics (flatness, weight, etc.). As for the statistics of non-living room HD sales in the U.S., I'm really curious to know the latest post-Christmas numbers. Here's another anecdotal data point for you all: I have a teenage son who bought a 32" LCD HDTV over a year ago with his own money. Why? Because he already had an XBox 360 and was just dying to do his gaming in high def. To this day, the display has never been used to watch TV, so obviously the internal 8-VSB demod has never been home-tested. But when he's not using it for gaming, it serves nicely for watching DVDs or as a second computer monitor. This Christmas I picked up another one (newer model, same manufacturer, $200 cheaper) for my teenage daughter. She actually does watch a fair amount of TV, mostly HD, so hers is hooked up to an HD cable STB. The internal 8-VSB demod in that TV will also never be home-tested. So much for the importance of the FCC's tuner mandate and the resulting added cost. It's about as useful in my house as the "V-chip." I have no doubt the 8-VSB chips in those TVs will get excellent reception here, based on my home-tests of 1st gen (several models) and my own company's 2nd gen demods so many years ago. In Phoenix, OTA viewers have the luxury of living in a flat 'valley' with the TV towers on a large mountain just south of downtown -- nearly ideal conditions for single-carrier digital reception with very benign multipath in most parts of the metro area. But for most people who own one or more HD displays, this is a big "so what?" You didn't spend all that money so you could get fantastic high def pictures on just a handful of channels. Yes the technology for delivering the signal has to work reliably -- that is the most basic fundamental -- but it does not define a viable business model. Let me add something to the popular cliche 'content is king.' It's more appropriate to say that the *quality* or popularity of the content is king, *variety* of content is queen, and the mechanism for *delivering* content is not even a member of the royal family. -- Frank Eory ---------------------------------------------------------------------- You can UNSUBSCRIBE from the OpenDTV list in two ways: - Using the UNSUBSCRIBE command in your user configuration settings at FreeLists.org - By sending a message to: opendtv-request@xxxxxxxxxxxxx with the word unsubscribe in the subject line. |