Hi,

My dad said he came across some show that said that HDTV was
implemented in Japan such that any old TV set was able receive and
display the new HD content without the TV owner buying/installing any
new equipment.  I think he's crazy because that's impossible.  Again,
he argued that the US is implementing HDTV all backwards because the
broadcast companies don't want to spend the money on the technology to
"upgrade everyone's TV set to HDTV by changing the signal broadcast
into the air".

I have searched the wikipedia, newsgroups, and everywhere else between
and have come up with nothing describing that above scenario.  Am I
wrong?

On 25 Nov 2005 17:53:46 -0800, "Dan"
<sponge_dan_square_pa***@yahoo.com> wrote:

Try Googling for MUSE

On Sat, 26 Nov 2005 11:32:59 +0000, Laurence Payne wrote:

[.......]
And you make this suggestion because . . . .

Bye.

It depends on what "receive and display the new HD content" means.  It
is possible to create an "augmentation" scheme for HDTV where one
channel contains a standard-definition TV signal while a second channel
is used to carry the extra information for higher resolution.  Then a
standard TV set can display HD programming at low resolution.

But that doesn't seem to be what Japan did.  Their broadcast HDTV system
seems to have used satellite broadcasting of a signal that is too wide
for terrestrial TV channels.  You could get a *converter* to receive
this and display the signal on a standard TV, but that was extra
hardware.  There's no reason you can't do the converter thing with North
American HDTV either.

And of course there is no way to get higher real resolution from an
unmodified standard TV set, even when displaying converted HD content.

Either he didn't understand the program, or the people who produced the
program didn't understand what they were talking about.

In North America, the painful thing for viewers is that analog TV
channels are going away *entirely* and they will have to buy a new TV
set.  When the UK switched from 405-line monochrome to 625-line colour
TV, they kept some of the old 405-line transmitters going for 50 years.
There's no way that will happen in NA; too many people want to make use
of the huge swath of radio spectrum that will be freed up when analog TV
is gone.

    Dave

On Sun, 27 Nov 2005 19:54:32 +0000 (UTC), da***@cs.ubc.ca (Dave
Martindale) wrote:

But our analogue channels will be turned off soon, just as in the US.
And for the same reason.

Believe it or not, all TV channels in Greece are still fully analogue, so
the radio, so the cell phone network.I've not seen  or heard of a digital tv
set yet,and I think that the state TV senders (ERT-1) are going to begin
*experimental* digital broadcasts soon, for which you will have to buy a
separate box, of course, since everybody is still having analogue CRT
TVs.Even the plasma and LCDs are analogue, and now I think came the sony
bravia which is "HDTV ready", whatever this means.I personally would never
pay 120 euros just to see the idiots in the TV in digital,I have enough of
them in analogue.Of course, I wouldn't like the idea throwing away my 29"
440 euros TV set, just because everything "must go digital".While I strongly
admit the superiority and excellence of the Cd to records and digital still
cameras to film cameras, digital moving pictures have a long way to go.Most
formats use a lossy compression algorithm, even the blu-ray (or HD-DVD) will
use one and even the flagship of modern technology,DVD produces in my
opinion sometimes pictures much inferior to good VHS cassetes.

Thank you for the answers!  I appreciate it!

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