On Sat, 8 Jan 2011 04:58:32 -0800, "William Sommerwerck"
wrote:

Did they make digital TVs compatible from
the US to Europe to Asia to Australia, etc?

The following gives an indirect answer...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital...ial_television

...which appears to be "no". There is no law of nature that prohibits a
multi-voltage, multi-standard receiver, but there is a law of economics --
there's little or no demand for one, as it would be useful only to people
who travelled a lot.

The reason I care is the opposite of that. There are only two
DVDR-with-harddrives for sale in the US, and one is cheaper than the
one I have, which itself is inferior in design. The other may be
better or not. However there are other models for sale in Australia,
and probably other parts of the world. I want to buy one from
Australia and use it here.

As for a single-inventory non-portable "universal" receiver... It would cost
more than a set that received only the local standard, so, again, you have
economics working against a multi-standard receiver.

What i had in mind wasn't** a multi-standard receiver but their
adopting one standard for the whole world, something they didnt' do
with B&W or color tv, for understandable reasons.

From reading the first few replies I guess the reason there is no
single standard now is so that the digital tv would play on analog
televisions, that making a set-top box or digital to analogue
converter which would also change frame rate was considered hard.

**OTOH, I am a broken DVD player that plays both NTSC and PAL dvds and
the girl who gave it to me said it cost 40 dollars. It even has a
button on the remote to change from NTSC to PAL and back. So the part
that handled the second format couldn't have been more than 5 dollars,
maybe 10, right? Maybe much less. Doesn't that mean it would cost
no more to include that in tvs?

(Strangely it does refer to needing matching regions, but gives no
indication on the box, on the player, or in the manual, what region it
is. My friend said it played the US and Europe and Japan, regions 1
and 2.