Picture Worth a Thousand Bucks
Halleluja! I went into a Best Buy in my neighborhood this weekend to buy a splitter for my cable and, to my surprise and delight, they seemed to have finally gotten it.
"It' is how to market HDTV so that people might actually want to buy it.
One of my pet peeves for several years has been the stores, including this one, that used leaky or low-res feeds to their sets so that the pictures on these large-screen babies looked like the picture you get with one of those giant lenses they used to try to sell you for $49.95 that are supposed to turn your 27-inch set into a 50-inch screen.
Yeah, like you can really see "everything" with those X-Ray Specs too.
Anyway, the sets that only a couple months ago looked like the blurry 20-year-old large-screen sets in Salvation Army thrift stores this time were displaying crisp beautiful pictur that made me want to shell out four figures, rather than blurry ones that made me keep my wallet in my pocket and wonder what all the fuss was about.
Then there was a Blue-Ray (or is it Blu-Ray?) demonstration that knocked me out. Are we going to have a Beta vs. VHS redux over DVD formats?
The biggest driver of HDTVs will be retailers who make a sharp picture a priority. Sounds like a no-brainer, but you'd be surprised how many stores still use a bad picture to try to sell a great set.
By John Eggerton
Bill Magliocco commented:
What has bothered me to no end is that the big box retailers never make the slightest attempt to show the local broadcast DTV stations in their demo equipment.
Wouldn't it be nice if CEA and NAB could get the local Best Buy and Circuit City to show off network programming on the big screens? Especially when HD programming is being shown?
Decades ago, I worked for a brown goods retailer in my home town that made the effort to give the TV sets he sold a decent picture by building his own MATV system. Granted, this was in the days before major brown goods retailers had their own agendas as to what must be shown inside the store.
Oh, well, one can only hope.
md2000 commented:
That's OK for the first few years, while HDTV is that novelty in your living room on the big TV.
When we want it in the rec room, the den, and 3 bedroms too, then what? At least with cable, I could split it; even get a cable amp so my satellite reaches the far bedroom. How do I transfer that set-top box (cable or sat) to 4 rooms in the house without wasting the quality that was the whole point of shelling out over $1000 per TV? Do they make 100-foot HDMI cables yet? Splitters? Get a second box and watch it in 480i?
They still haven't solved that.