Old TV shows that were shot and edited on film look better on HD than they did when they first came out, as long as the original film elements have been properly preserved. Shows shot on film but edited in NTSC video, as many prime-time shows in the
1990s don’t look any better than they did originally.

The owners of the established cable channels have taken one of three approaches for HDTV conversion:

• One channel at a time:
HBO and Showtime premiered their HDTV feeds on satellite in 1998. They’re now also available on many (though not all) cable systems, along with HD versions of other main premium channels (Cinemax, The Movie Channel, Encore, Starz). HBO, Showtime, and Starz are now rolling out HD versions of some of their “multiplex” subsidiary channels.

Besides the premium channels, the following established national cable/satellite channels have launched HD versions: CNN, TNT, TBS, ESPN, ESPN2, Food Network, HGTV, National Geographic, A&E, Discovery, TLC, Animal Planet, the Science Channel, the History, Lifetime Movie Network, USA, Bravo, Sci Fi, the Weather Channel, the NFL Network, NBA TV, the Big Ten Network, the Golf Channel, and Versus (formerly OLN). The new Fox Business Network launched in October 2007 in both SD and HD feeds. (These HD channels’ schedules may vary from those of their respective parent channels; some of their programming may be up-converted from SD.)

Many regional sports channels, including most local variants of Fox Sports Net, also transmit HD versions on participating cable systems on at least part-time schedules.

Channels announced to launch HD versions later in 2007–2008 include BBC America, CNBC, Speed Channel, Fuel TV, Biography, Spike, the Tennis Channel, College Sports TV (CSTV), Cartoon Network, Nickelodeon, MTV, Country Music Television (CMT),
VH1, FX, ABC Family, the Disney Channel, Toon Disney, and ESPNews; plus the new MGM HD movie channel.

• Grouping several channels into one:
In the 1990s, niche marketing was the name of the cable programming game. The big media companies launched ever-narrower new channels and spin-offs from their existing channels.

In the early 2000s, many of these same media giants consolidated their properties for HD. They did this because many cable-system operators were reluctant to add a lot of HD channels while most of their customers didn’t have HD sets.

Discovery HD Theater aired programs from the main Discovery and its TLC, Animal Planet, and other spin offs. NBC Universal had Universal HD, offering programs from its USA, Bravo, and Sci Fi channels and the Universal film library. MHD combined material from Viacom’s music channels MTV, VH1, CMT, and BET. Fox HDTV combined material from FX and Fox Movie Channel, as well as Fox network repeats.

As these companies roll out HD versions of their established brands, their catch-all HD channels are being re-branded. Universal HD, as an example, has become USA HD.

• Providing HD shows to other channel operators:
Several established cable channels supplied selected programs to Mojo or HDNet, while building a library of programs to eventually run on HD channels of their own. These channels included E, A&E, and Hallmark.

So in February 2009, you can expect to see a lot of your favorite classic television shows along with new programming broadcast directly to your new flat-screen television in high-defintion. If you’re still waiting to get a great deal on a new flat-screen television in anticipation of HD television; you can always find a deal online no matter what size screen you’re looking for. Here a 5 great HDTV deals for under $1000, and just in time for Christmas, so you can enjoy digital broadcast television from just about every channel on cable and satellite.

Having addressed the design challenges of limited space, heat dissipation and audio quality, TV manufacturers are now able to provide consumers with additional audio features – enabled through both semiconductor hardware and specialized software – that will give consumers not only a better audio experience but also greater control over their preferred audio settings. For example, one of the newer and promising features is intelligent volume control, which allows users to set their preferred audio listening levels no matter what the audio source is. With this feature alone, consumers no longer need to adjust their TV’s volume because of volume discrepancies between TV shows and commercials, or from channel-to-channel while surfing. In addition, this feature, made possible through specialized audio algorithms, can be employed to offer a “midnight mode” setting, which effectively serves to minimize bass frequency output. This feature is especially valued by neighbors as well as others in the house who are trying to sleep in an adjacent room while another person is watching an explosion-laden action-adventure movie.

Intelligent volume is just one example of many features OEMs can utilize to differentiate and add value to their flat-panel TVs. Some of the other features available include(but are not limited to)bass enhancement, virtual surround sound, speaker calibration, audio pre-sets for various viewing experiences (eg. live sports) and many standard audio post-processing algorithms (eg. Dolby, DTS, SRS, BBE). Naturally, if you connect your new flat-panel HDTV to a great surround sound system, then it will always sound better than with just the television speakers alone.

You’ll probably find that major chains, specialty stores, and online retailers have similar pricing, at least on non-clearance prices for identical models. But different retailers have clearance discounts on different models at different times. Also, online retailers and discount chains often carry larger selections of minor-brand products, which can be less expensive than the major advertised brands. Retailers also differentiate themselves with added-value services (delivery, installation, extended warranties).

Your first stop may be the major chain store, like Best Buy or Circuit City. Among the advantages to major chains: They show all the display technologies we’ve talked about in operation (that’s important, since what TV technology to buy is as much an aesthetic decision as anything else). You can drive home with your purchase. You know where to go for service issues.

Among the disadvantages of major chains: Customer service can be spotty. Salespeople, when they are available, might be more interested in what they want to sell than in what you want to buy. These chains also offer online shopping, but product selection and pricing may be different online than in the chains’ brick-and-mortar outlets. (Walmart and Radio Shack, in particular, offer far more DTV products on their Web sites than in their stores.)

In many metro areas, independent stores and regional chains, like Abe’s of Maine and Vann’s offer every level of electronics including high-end audio and video gear. Some offer more handholding, more attentive salespeople, more comprehensive warranties, and in-home installation assistance. As these stores cater to mostly local customers, much of the added expense to the consumer is customer service. Extra customer service may may fine for some people, but it isn’t what everyone is looking for when they are purchasing a television.

Shopping online is usually more convenient and safe, as long as you deal with reputable companies. When you shop online, keep the delivery charge in mind—it should be included in the final price, but many stores offer free shipping. Disadvantages you might encounter include not seeing the equipment in action before you buy and if the TV has a problem (such as the dreaded “dead pixels”), you might have to repackage and ship the entire unit back and wait days or weeks to get it back. You’ll find many great deals along with a large selection of LCD, Plasma, DLP and OLED televisions from these leading retailers.

• Sony
• Amazon
• J&R
• Buy.com
• TigerDirect
• Walmart
• onSale
• Vann’s
• Abe’s Of Maine
• ShopNBC
• TheNerds.net
• Overstock
• Electronic Express
• Big Screen Center

Use an aggregator or price-comparison shopping Web site to quickly locate and compare offers from many online retailers. Delivery, service, and support are handled by the participating retailers, not by the Web sites that carry their listings. These sites include:

• Buyer’s Edge
• CNET Shopper
• dealnews
• eBay Stores
• Google Product Search
• mySimon
• NexTag
• PriceGrabber.com
• Yahoo! Shopping

Online Auctions

If you’re willing to settle for last year’s technologies, you can pick up a real bargain at eBay and other auction sites. Just beware of the usual caveats involving auction buying: Check the seller’s reputation. Use an escrow service, so the seller won’t get your money until after you’ve checked out the goods. Beware of scam artists.

Before you bid, determine the shipping cost of the item. Digital TV hardware can be big and heavy. Ground shipping costs (including insurance, which you should definitely get) could negate any price advantage of auction buying, unless you bid only on items from sellers in your own locality.

Consumer alert! Some notes of caution when visiting brick-and mortar retail outlets: Some stores feed HD signals only to the more expensive sets on the floor, leaving more modestly priced, but still HD-capable, sets to show non-HD programming. Or, store personnel might deliberately adjust a particular higher-profit-margin unit to display a better picture. Or, they might not even know how to properly set up and adjust the sets they display.

If you’re in the process of buying a new television or possibly outfitting your home with several new flat screens for Christmas, then you’ll probably have a few old TVs that you need to get rid of. So if you have an old analog TV just sitting there that you will never use again, now is a great time to think of an environmentally friendly way of disposing of your old television. If you’re at a loss for ideas on what you can do with your old televisions; here’s what to do.

Discard or Recycle It

Don’t stick your old set in a trash can or dumpster. It’s a waste of reusable materials, and adds potentially toxic matter (including lead and various metals) to landfills and water tables. In some localities, it’s illegal to dump TV and computer equipment in the regular trash.

Discard it properly, at an electronics recycling center in your area. Just do a quick search on the internet to easily find one or try one of these Web sites:

• Freecycle
• The Rethink Initiative
• Environment, Health and Safety Online

Hewlett-Packard and Sony now offer return-for-recycling programs for electronic products. See:

• HP Eco Solutions
• Sony Recycle

Sell It or Give It Away

You can sell your old television or simply give it away. Don’t expect a huge payoff for your analog TV on an auction Website or at a garage sale, thanks to the massive deflation in home electronics prices over the past decades. (Exception: A few classic models have become collectors’ items, such as the stylized Philco Predicta sets from the late 1950s.)

If you don’t need the money, consider donating your set to a local charity thrift store that can sell it, or to a nonprofit agency that can use it. You can donate it to a nursing home, low-income housing provider, school, arts agency, or even a conceptual artist working on a retro-modern piece. These electronics donation and recycling centers make it easier than ever to get rid of your unwanted electronics.

Or you could keep it in the family, as a hand-me-down to an adult child or as an extra set in the den, home office, kids’ room, or guest room. Just remember: No matter where your old TV goes, its built-in analog tuner will be useless when analog telecasts end. When that day comes, the old set will display video only if it’s connected to a cable or satellite box, an external digital tuner, a VCR, or a DVD player, so it’s not exactly useless as someone else could probably give your old television a good home. As there are plenty of ways to recycle your old television instead of just junking it, you can now buy that new television with a clear conscience knowing that your old television will be put to good re-use and not be taking up valuable space in a landfill.

Analog TV was originally fixed at a 4 x 3 image size, one-and-a-third times wide as it is high (hence also known as 1.33:1). It was close to the 1.37:1 ratio established for theatrical films by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. But in the early 1950s, when TV viewing began to cut into movie-theater attendance, movie studios tried various widescreen formats (such as Cinerama, Panavision, and CinemaScope), which could be as wide as 2.76:1. Most of today’s feature films are intended for screening at 1.85:1. (For more about widescreen cinema, see The American WideScreen Museum.)

Widescreen TVs (including all HDTVs) and most widescreen DVDs have a ratio of 16 x 9, or 1.78:1. This allows most films made in the past half-century to be shown full-screen with little or no letterboxing. These screens display older films, and non-HDTV signals, with black bars at the left and right—unless these screens have been adjusted to stretch the image for a fake widescreen effect. Many cinema display computer monitors have a 16 x 10 (1.6:1) ratio. That’s close to 1.618:1, the Golden Rectangle, which Greek geometer Euclid called one of the most pleasing shapes to the human eye. (For more information about the Golden Rectangle, see Wolfram MathWorld.)

Whether the dimension of television screens changes in the future is yet to be determined, but you can be sure that widescreen televisions are here to stay as they can offer the cinema-like experience from the comfort of your living room with exceptional clarity.

HDTV, also known as high-definition television, emerged in the early 1980s as an experimental Japanese analog system developed by Japan’s public TV network, NHK, which began research and development for this technology as far back as 1963. It offered near-theater-quality pictures and a surround sound, but it required too much bandwidth to be transmitted on standard TV channels. NHK marketed its analog HDTV worldwide under the names Hi-Vision and MUSE (Multiple Sub-Nyquist Sampling Encoding), but it never spread commercially beyond Japan.

The FCC rejected NHK’s analog HDTV for use in the United States, because it required 9 MHz of broadcast bandwidth, which was 1.5 times that of the standard U.S. television channels. In addition, the FCC felt political pressure to nurture a homegrown advanced-TV system, hoping to stem Japan’s dominance of the video-hardware industry. As Canada’s FCC equivalent, the CRTC, nearly always followed the technical standards adopted in the United States by the FCC, Canada again followed the lead of the United States for digital television.

In 1982, the Advanced Television Systems Committee (ATSC), was formed by several industry and professional associations which included the National Association of Broadcasters, the National Cable Television Association, and the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, among others. The committee’s name was based on the old NTSC acronym, and this group would spearhead private-sector efforts to create a new way to produce, send, and receive TV signals. In 1987, the FCC formed the Advisory Committee on Advanced Television Service to oversee the government’s side of advancing TV technology. Initially, it rejected several proposals for enhanced analog TV systems, because none of them provided enough improvement over traditional NTSC signals within the bandwidth of a standard TV channel.

As analog video uses a continuous, variable electrical signal, the new solution would be digital. In contrast, digital video uses a sequence of discrete binary digits or 1s and 0s following the basis of computing technology. These digits would form the pixels (picture elements), that combine to produce final picture you see on screen. Digital video images weren’t intrinsically superior to analog video images, but they provided an opportunity to move beyond the NTSC’s primitive color encoding. They could be copied and retransmitted with no degradation in image quality, and more importantly, these digital signals could be compressed by replacing redundant information with mathematical algorithms.

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, digital video surfaced on two fronts. The first came on the professional end with lightweight chip-based cameras and tape-less editing systems, which eventually revolutionized video production that makes today’s nonstop news channels and reality shows more feasible. The second front came in the mid-1990s with the proliferation of the world wide web gave rise to various new compressed video formats from the likes of Apple, RealNetworks, and Microsoft among others by bringing small-screen-size video clips to computer desktops around the world. As broadband connections were not not readily available at the consumer level back then, image compression was standard in every online-video.

Digital video compression wouldn’t end these these proprietary systems, as other digital video standards are available for license to the industry as a whole. The most prominent of these is the MPEG series of specifications that is named for the Moving Picture Experts Group, the international consortium that originally worked out both audio and video compression standards. The audio-compression format known popularly as MP3 is a subset of the group’s earliest video format, MPEG-1. The group’s MPEG-2 video standard has become a basic part of digital TV standards in the United States. Thanks to digital compression, high-definition signals could at last fit into standard broadcast TV channels, with room for one or two standard-definition signals as well.

The National Television System Committee (NTSC), made up of corporate and governmental representatives, devised the transmission standards for North American TV. They included 525 horizontal lines (including 480 devoted to the picture), at 60 interlaced fields or half-frames (for 30 total frames) of black-and-white pictures per second, transmitted on 6 MHz channels, with frequency-modulated (FM) audio. In the early 1950s, a second NTSC was formed to add color information to the signals. The committee chose RCA’s “compatible” color scheme, which enabled existing black-and-white TV sets to receive monochrome versions of color transmissions. This coloring was done by adding a color signal (chrominance) to the existing brightness signal (luminance), which added color without enhancing the signal. By the mid-1980s, the NTSC phased in stereo sound and closed captioning subtitles for the hearing impaired, which were the last major additions to NTSC analog TV. For more than 4 decades, all video innovations including videotape, camcorders, cable, VCRs, and other video equipment sold in the United States and Canada would be made to these NTSC specifications. The NTSC color standard has long been derided by videophiles as “never the same color” becuase of the relatively fuzzy picture and the wandering color hues, but NTSC will soon become part of history.

When European countries decided to switch to color in the 1960s, they chose to go with newer and more advanced broadcasts standards — either PAL (phase alternating line), developed in Germany, or SÉCAM (séquentiel couleur avec mémoire, or sequential color with memory), developed in France. Both of these standards offered more lines with better color than NTSC, but were not only incompatible with the NTSC system but also within their own countries’ black and white telecasts. Even with the different standards, European viewers enjoyed sharper pictures with higher resolution and more stable colors than those in North America. As well, for several years, Europe’s broadcasters would simulcast the same shows on separate color and black and white channels, before they finally shut off the black-and-white channels. The British Broadcasting Corporation launched color channels in 1967 and didn’t scrap the last black and white channels until in 1985.

Now, the United States and Canada are going through a similar transition from analog to digital television technology advancements that include the ever important color-stabilization, among other things. Digital television transition is a game changer for the way we watch TV in the near future.