Why does HDTV-ready LCD TV produce better images than LCD ..

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.tv.tech.hdtv (More info?)

I was at CircuitCity. They had 17" Samsung, Sharp, and Philips
LCD TV on display and was playing "Friends", but I couldn't tell
if it was DVD or TV signal. Some of the sets have "HDTV" on
their bezels. Later I checked their specs, it seems all of them
are just HDTV-Ready, not HDTV tuner included. Their models are
Philps PHL 15PF9936 and 17PF9936, Samsung SAM LTN1565 and
LTN1765.

By comparison, the images on thoese HDTV-*Ready* LCD TV sets look
sharper than the ones on regular LCD TV sets. At one time, I saw
clear eyes on thoese HDTV-*ready* LCD TV sets, but fuzzy ones on
LCD TV sets.

My first question is rather technical, what do manufactures add
to a LCD TV to make it a HDTV-*ready* LCD TV? Like maybe more
but smaller pixals?

Second, without a HDTV tuner, Does HDTV-Ready LCD TV give better
image quality than regular LCD TV does when they are connected to
an off-the-air antenna?

 

[Guest]

Archived from groups: alt.tv.tech.hdtv (More info?)

"HDTV ready" is ready for an HDTV format signal. That signal can come
from cable, satelite or dvd or whatever but not from a built in over
the air radio tower receiver. If you want to watch tv via a radio
tower than you have to buy a HDTV radio receiver. These are relatively
expensive and not extremely usefull in most cases. Most people don't
use over the air radio towers to receive television so I don't see
this as a problem. 80% of america uses cable or satelite. This is
mostly due to the fact that radio towers are not put up close enough
to homes for the signals to reach. The USA FCC chose an HDTV radio
format called 8VSB. This format is differnt from the other format that
the rest of the world has chosen which has been said to improve radio
performance. This hurts the hardware market for buying 8VSB receivers
and, so, the price is high in addition to the poor technology. This
does not make 8VSB hardware look very worth while to buy.

Basically the display screen is totaly seperate from the radio
receiver. HDTV ready by itself doesn't controll the screen hardware
used in the tv. In addition, the signal you were watching in the store
was not coming from the radio receiver. So, doubly, there is no way
that this could have affected the picture you were looking at.

Whatever correlation you observed bewteen the radio tv's and the non
radio tv's it was not due to the actual radio receiver. So you might
not have been imagining the image difference, but it must has to be
related to something else.

People are tempted to get radio receivers because you can get a free
HDTV channel for each tower you can reach. The cable and satelite are
really the largest part of the market. I don't know about the satelite
ruling by the FCC, but the FCC ruled that cable receivers will have to
be installed in new tv's to allow recpetion of DTV.

So what you want to look for is "Digital Cable Ready" this year and in
the future. These Tv's will be able to plug right into the cable coax
in your house and get DTV/HDTV. You won't be limited by over the air
selection and reception. Your cable provider can send many more
stations. These Tv's are just starting to arrive in stores so don't be
surprised if you haven't heard of this. But this is the really
important step for DTV/HDTV because it gives good way of receiving
DTV/HDTV... FINALY, YES!.

Mitsubishi (for example) is working hard to implement the FCC's DTV
Tuner Mandate. They expect all of their displays to be 100% integrated
by 2005. If you want an HDTV and haven't gotten one yet I would
seriously get a digital cable ready one!
You can read about this from http/www.thedigitalbits.com .
Look for "4/26 DAILY COLUMN: CableCARD compatibility coming in 2004
Mitsu HDTVs"