Worth buying a HDTV now?

[neilmcl]

Originally Posted by 10bii

Thing is if a person is going to buy such tvs to take advantage of HD then they will have no choice but to deal with less than ideal SD image quality on said tvs.

True, but they never seem to be told that though. There are obviously plenty of people buying screens today with the intent of taking full advanatge of the HD services when they arrive but for each one of them there are plenty of customers simply replacing their current equipment and are being sold the latest tech whether they'll use it for HD or not, they'll be seduced by the retailer's patter and the excellant quality of the demos only finding out when they get the TV back home that it doesn't quite meet expectations.

There are loads of posts over on the LCD forum, for example, of people buying the latest HD models only to find out they're relatively poor at SD, and these are the ones that have done some research not the usual Joe Public.

[mike7]

He's talking about SD programme sources. If you read his post again you'll see that he's suggesting people were being led to believe that they would be able to achieve the same stunning quality they were seeing via HD at the show when they got home and plugged their brand new purchases into SD sources.

His assesment doesn't add up. Why would the public think that HD displays with HD sources would look the same with current TV programmes? How was the public being misled?

Sorry if my message was unclear. I was listening to people's comments at the Show. They were looking at computer generated HD pictures on HD TVs. I suspect that most of them have no idea what HD is, or ever heard of HDMI or the Sky HD service. They see a pretty picture on a TV at the show. When they get the set home and use it for normal SD via an aerial or a freeview box they will wonder why it is not as great as they saw in the demo. People are generally not techno minded, its all moved to fast for them. A great number of customers do not know how, or why, they need to set a digital box for 16:9 if they have a widescreen TV. I go into a lot of homes in the course of my job and the number of distorted pictures I see on TV's astounds me.

I did not hear one salesman at the weekend say 'Of course this is a High definition picture, and you will need to spend another £300 to buy a Sky box, and then there will an additional charge if you want to receive the channels.'

Education on HD has a long way to go.