New TV- Not Quite Hi Def...

Over the weekend, I received my first "digital television," a Samsung 26" LCD. It came via UPS, and it was worth waiting around all day for it to arrive. While I was at first a little worried that the TV only shipped in the manufacturer's box, and not any outer box, it did arrive unscathed.

I had looked into the issue of antenna reception a while back, and had read that there was no such thing as a digital antenna. The rule of thumb is that those that get decent analog TV reception should do fine with digital as well (www.antennaweb.org is a rule of thumb for what channels you should expect to get, and I expected several). Good enough, I figured as I get all the analog channels without too much difficulty. However, there was a crucial detail that I didn't realize, and now is a lot more obvious with some searching.

Anyway, I hooked up the set, and plugged in my rooftop antenna. I did a channel scan, and it found the usual analog stations, plus brought in three UHF stations with tons and tons of fuzz. Curiously (more on this later), I had one channel, ABC in digital glory. Actually, it kept pixelating every few seconds and dropping out. Outside, it was raining pretty hard so I figured I'd have to redo the channel scan in better weather. Curiously, the analog version of ABC didn't look so different to the digital version, except for the pixel pattern being a digital exclusive.

A few hours later, the rain stopped, and on the channel scan there were no digital channels! Hmmm- this is not what I expected. Like any self respecting TechNudger would do, I turned to the internet. Before I asked for some sagely Oldster advice (who has fiberoptic deliver his TV these days), I looked into some forums. When I searched through these threads, I started to realize that my venture into digital content was grounded from the start. I learned that the hi def content is sent over vacant UHF channels, not the VHF frequencies, that we better know as the 2 through 13 channels. The problem is that my antenna is the classic 70's model that only tunes in VHF and not UHF. When I picked up the digital ABC one, due to some weather anomaly, that was the exception, and not the rule (that I haven't been able to duplicate, FYI).

The bottom line is that without a newer antenna, made to bring in the UHF signals, there will be no high definition content on the new set. Thankfully all is not lost. The Samsung set does have an analog tuner as well. While it does not have the perfection of a digital signal, the TV is still perfectly watchable. For the time being, I plan to research and save up for a new antenna. I'm just glad that I started the switch to digital TV this early because it got a little more complicated than I would have expected. At this point you can count me in with the 15% of Americans with an HDTV, but remember that 47% of us don't have any hi def content on it- yet.

--Jonas