engadgethd.com — A recent report claims that "about 19.5 million consumers" who purchased an HDTV over the holiday break are now complaining about the quality. Apparently, the "plug and play" approach that has become quite common on today's electronics didn't work out so well with HDTVs, leaving customers baffled...
Dec 31, 2006 View in Crawl 4
sporkmanJan 1, 2007
no, I'm not trying to get you to shop at Best Buy, in fact, I really could care less. I just think it's stupid that you guys complain about not knowing something, and the sales person not telling you, when it's your fault for not knowing it. if you don't like being bulls**tted by a sales person, then shop somewhere else, oh wait, every business bulls**ts, even when if you try to buy a washer and dryer, or well, pretty much anything. do research before you buy something, I NEVER trust someone at a store, be able to correct the person trying to sell you something, or better yet, when they ask "did you need help with something?" say "No, I'm good, but I might later, thanks" and just keep looking for what you want.AND monster cables are good quality, now sure on digital signals, it doesn't really matter, but on analog it is best to have high quality cables.
Closed AccountJan 1, 2007
People do not want to read pamphlets.People just want a similar tv to their neighbor/business partner/co-worker, only slightly bigger.
betacmag4uJan 1, 2007
@ashchristopher @WiZZLa - No, they dont work on commission for selling you the TV, but they do get a commission for selling you the warranty and getting you to purchase using their financing. The have just moved the commission around.----- further it is important that on average only 12% of the cost of a warranty goes to the fullfillment of warranty issues and the other 88% goes for overhead and commissions :(
dougm68Jan 1, 2007
Lets see if this makes it clear for ya junkyard.Your old 'CRT' T.V. will project a good image to a single 'pixel' represented by this - > [x] (x = signal)A HD T.V. triples this pixel resolution by 3! -> [x] [x] [x]If you DON'T subscribe to an HD content provider until it is eventually mandated upon you in the year 2009and you keep using analog signal for your HD T.V. then the analog signal gets allocated like so -> [ ] [x] [ ]Notice how hd leaves two signal holders empty because of your inadequacy thus causing a fuzzy distorted image that looks worse than you old crappy CRT T.V. which only accepts [x] ...because its lame.Hope that clears it up. =)
choadnamathJan 2, 2007
"This may sound crazy but for those people out there who have 1080i/p sets do you EVER watch on 720p? Please realize that I am not referring to OTA signals but for those who have a box where you can select the output that you want to be sent to your TV?I propose that 720p become a standard for gaming (until next gen... if even then) only and that HD be defined as 1080i and HD+ would be defined as 1080p. What do you guys think?"If you watch sports, you definitely want it progressive and not interlaced. It's no fun watching blurry/fuzzy football games because it's an interlaced signal. It's really annoying that they went with an interlaced standard now that that vast majority of HDTVs are not CRTs. I know they wanted to conserve bandwidth, etc., but I'll take 720p over 1080i any day of the week. It would be great if they just stuck with 720p until there's available bandwidth to deliver 1080p content.
apothekariJan 11, 2007
OKFirst of all when I purchased the TV in 1/05 I had 1000.00 TO SPEND.no more no less I consulted 10 to fifteen articles and if one of them mentioned the 1080/720 issue I may have overlooked it.The point is THIS IS AN IMPORTANT CONSIDERATION{720/1080} and I fell prey to it through no fault of my own.I consider myself and intelligent and fairly educated consumer, and yet this rather unfortunate bit of business occured to me in spite of my best efforts. now I live with it I like the TV.But I was saying that I CAN UNDERSTAND WHY THE AVERAGE CONSUMER FEELS PISSED OFF!I have worked in retail as a camera salesman for years and if this was a similar goddamn problem on a camera WE WOULD HAVE MADE THAT VERY CLEAR.If I had 4000.00 to spend on a TV it would not have come up because as I understand it more expensive sets would not have suffered from this deficiency.Those are my points.I NEVER indicated I was an official purchaser for CRUTCHFIELD or a TV repair guy or home theater expert.I said buff,somewhere between type a mouth-breather consumer and Type a obnoxious stat nerd who knows the voltage emittance of every CRT tube since '58.For the love of Ernie Kovacs, understand,empathize....The current generation of TV/video is WAAAAAAY to concerned with the welfare of the companies involved and No worry whatever is paid to the end user's welfare.
closetfireMay 5, 2007
I think the real crime here isn't so much that people are getting horrible looking compressed signals when they deserve the HD they paid out for (tho that is a big issue), but rather the fact that congress legislated mandatory HDTV transition in the first place. This was a giveaway to electronics manufacturers at the expense of television broadcasters and low income consumers. IMO the govt. has no place to mandate such superfluous technology requirements without a clear and obvious benefit to the american public.And I don't find "a sharper picture" worthy of mandatory legislation. On the contrary, these televisions suck up scads more power than any ordinary SDTV and are several magnitudes more complex to operate. This is bad for the consumer. A low (and I mean very low) income family can get a low end SD tv for a hundred dollars, and low end HDTVs? I would argue that at the moment there is no such thing. Once the switchover becomes mandatory, millions of poor in america's inner cities will be without television service altogether unless their cities institute a program to provide free set top boxes (because I can guarantee you they don't have cable services that will do it).So when do we pass legislation that makes HD radio manditory too? Then we can REALLY make the poor feel like second class citizens.