"Clifton T. Sharp Jr." wrote in message
...
Ray L. Volts wrote:
Who among you has determined to close the doors to your shop once HDTV
broadcast is mandated in 2008 (or is that 2006, they keep changing their
damn minds)?

1. HDTV isn't going to be cheap. Expensive sets get fixed. Even if they
get modularized, a la PCs, parts won't be cheap; but they won't, they'll
stay proprietary in both design and assembly construction.

The sets should be affordable for the masses by 2008, and downright cheap in
another 10 years, if you use the past few years as a model for price drop
rates.
I was thinking a little farther into the future when I posited that
hypothetical. I should have mentioned this, instead of implying the time
frame ends at 2008 by using the conversion to HDTV as a marker.

2. I just bought a brand-new NTSC-only set. The FCC may mandate nothing
but HD on the air, but cable systems aren't going to drop their NTSC
any time soon. Lots of others like me are going to find that they can
stick to NTSC and still receive programming.

I was under the impression the television industry as a whole would be
required to change over to HDTV format exclusively. But it shouldn't matter
if cable systems did ditch NTSC, because I'm sure there would be set-top
HDTV-to-NTSC converter boxes like the ones they'll be offering to broadcast
viewers.