Trent Stevens wrote:

On 2007-06-26 01:54:33 -0500, mm said:

On Tue, 26 Jun 2007 00:31:38 -0400, mm
wrote:


Someone on this list or more likely sci.electronics.repair said a feww
months ago that it applied to cable too, and posted a link to
government or at least a serious looking site that gave the text of
the reg or statute that required this. It looked real to me.

I've searched for this thread for the last 20 minutes in my old s.e.r
posts and via groups.google, and I can't find it.

Well, I've looked for another 60 minutes and foudn some interesting
stuff, including several who agree that cable will still have analog,
until they stop for lack of profit,

But I've still found no reference to what I know I read, that there is
a reg against this.

I would be happy if cable had analog, because it would give me one
more alternative. I have a tv in every rroom, a color tv finally, and
no way am I replacing all of these, or any, with digital tvs.

I'm sorry you feel that way, but I'm glad to see NTSC go away. NTSC was
never designed to handle color data it was added as a "hack" and is a
very inefficient system.

NTSC (Never The Same Color) is indeed a hack, but a perfectly good hack.
The quality is quite acceptable given a clean transmission.

With the move to HD (really ATSC as it's not
a resolution dependant issue) you get the delivery of a channel in much
less bandwidth.

Bandwidth isn't really an issue either as the voluminous gaps in the
NTSC transmission spectrum can be back filled with lots of narrow band
digital signals as is done on cable.


If you want to keep your old TV's you will be able to buy cheap
converters (just like are used for cable reception) that will convert
the new ATSC signal to NTSC.

Really? Cheap converters? Hardly. I define "cheap" as $25 and I fully
expect all such converters will be upwards of $100 the same as the old
closed caption boxes were until CC decoders were mandated to be
integrated into new TVs (over 14"). Since the bulk of the clueless
public will buy new TVs rather than converters, converters will remain a
fringe item just like CC decoders were and will remain expensive.

Getting rid of old technology often
causes a little hardship but everyone is better off in the end.
Example - God knows we should have suffered the "pain" of converting to
metric long ago but we can thank the pandering politicians for our
current backwards standard.

Problem is in this case there is no good reason to get rid of the old
technology. New technology can be introduced and the old technology can
fade away on it's own if the new technology is accepted. Based on the
apparent adoption rates of the ATSC stuff today, it doesn't seem to be
getting accepted too rapidly. The new "HD" radio junk is pretty lame
too.