The Muhlestein Family

The Quest for HDTV

February 10th, 2008

For a while, we’ve had our eye on a larger TV set. The old 21″ tube that we received from Gayla’s parents was just a little out of date. We decided we’d spend some of our tax refund on a new flat screen LCD TV. For the last while, I’ve been researching all the different options for receiving digital content and I thought I’d write it down for whomever is interested.

We ended up getting a refurbished TV instead of purchasing one locally. After the shipping costs, we still saved about $160. Pretty much any flat screen TV you purchase these days is going to have a wide screen ratio of 16:9. Most older TVs have a 4:3 ratio. When you rent a movie formated for 4:3, it usually says “This movie has been formatted to fit this screen” or something similar. Now, since all of our movies and TV are still being played in that ratio, we have black bars on the sides instead of on the top and bottom!

DTV Options

If you’ve seen standard definition programming on a high resolution screen, you might have noticed that it doesn’t look as good. You can see fuzzy edges and the whole picture looks slightly blurry. To get a nice crisp picture, you have to have high definition programming. As soon as I started looking around at different options for HD programming, I was dismayed at the costs. We currently have Dish Network. To upgrade to an HD receiver and HD programming, we have to pay extra for a nicer receiver, extra for additional channels (they don’t offer the family package in HD), and extra just for having HD. The entire cost comes to around $77/month. I’m unwilling to shell out $77/month for a bunch of crappy channels that I don’t care about anyway so I kept looking. I found out that the other options for purchasing HD programming are pretty much similar in price to Dish Networks. You can’t be fooled by Comcast’s triple play or any of the other offers out there. They give you a nicer rate up front but in the end, charge an arm and a leg.

The good news is that in most areas, you can get the local channels for free over the air. You may have heard about the February 2009 deadline for TV stations to broadcast digital signals instead of analog signals. This means that if you use an antenna to watch TV and you have an old TV, you’ll have to either upgrade your TV or purchase a set top box for around $40 that converts the new digital signals to analog that your TV can understand. If you think that stinks, the government will give you a $40 rebate toward the purchase. Many people are opting simply to upgrade their TV.

I want to distinguish between DTV and HDTV. Many stations are broadcast digitally but they are still in a lower resolution. The only difference with HDTV is that it is broadcast at a higher resolution. Usually, HDTV also has an accompanying 5.1 surround sound audio track being broadcast too. Either way, DTV or HDTV, you have to have a new TV or a set top box to receive it over the air.

Back to Bunny Ears

I decided to give the old bunny ears a try. Most of the shows we like are on locally broadcast channels anyway and we could get a Tivo to record them. (You can plug the antenna into a Tivo too.) I first bought a $15 pair of bunny ears at Best Buy. We seem to have a dead spot in our house around where the TV is. We could pick up a few channels OK but none of the digital channels. I took that back and picked a $30 version at Walmart that has an inline signal amplifier. It worked a lot better. We could pick up a few digital channels. They look great! We still have the receiving problem by our TV and I had to move them by a window to get results so I decided to go all out and by a bigger $60 antenna that you can mount inside your attic.

I had more trouble finding a spot to mount that antenna than I ever thought the result was worth. We could pick up 18-23 digital channels depending on where I could position that antenna but I couldn’t find a good way to route a cable from the attic to where our TV is. In addition, we should have been able to pick up more channels. I could find some in some places and other positions would get different ones. After cutting two holes in different walls (I still have to repair those), and trying different indoor and outdoor positions, I decided it just wasn’t worth it and took that one back too. I think we’ll just buy a nice outdoor antenna that mounts on the roof and hook it to the cable that our Dish Network satellite is currently connected to. We still have a few more months on our Dish contract so we can’t get rid of that just yet. I guess in the mean time we’ll have to deal with a not as high quality TV picture.

On the bright side, Wii games look great with component cables!

Entry Filed under: Family, Misc