In the article below you will see some of the reasons people will go nuts over having our technology.
HDTV installation can be a real turnoff
By Dawn C. Chmielewski
Knight Ridder Newspapers
LOS ANGELES - To see high-definition television is to want HDTV. It is more eye-catching than Jennifer Lopez's neckline, more breathtaking than Yosemite's El Capitan and crisper than the white slopes of Tahoe against a blue sky.
I've wanted one ever since that day, three years ago, when I noticed what looked like a bubbling fish tank in the middle of the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. At first, I was perplexed. Tropical fish instead of spokes-models in fishnet? That's so wrong.
Only upon closer inspection did I realize I was staring at a television monitor. I've been hooked ever since, but the $10,000 price tag made HDTV a luxury item.
Recent drops in price make digital television affordable as the centerpiece of our home theater system. Prices range from a high of about $29,000 for a 64-inch Plasma display - those flat-screen, gas-filled monitors that produce an image truly suitable for framing - to $1,000 for the 27-inch digital color monitor. And with Princeton Technologies offering its new 36-inch direct-view monitor on loan, I thought: Hey, why not?
Silly, naive me.
As I compose these words, I'm entering Day 3 of what I'll delicately refer to as "HDTV hell." It's not the installer's fault. AudioVisions is a professional outfit that has designed award-winning home theater systems that cost more than my house. These guys are pros.
What we're dealing with here is a technology that's not yet ready for prime time.
The installation took 21 hours, three external antennas - including a 1960s clothesline throwback that's bound to violate at least 10 sections of our homeowners-association rules - and one rewiring of all the components to coax the Princeton monitor to communicate with Princeton's own HDTV receiver.
The payoff: five digital-television stations, out of 40 transmitting digital signals from Mount Wilson north of Los Angeles. Only one -- the PBS affiliate, KCET - broadcast programming in the hyper-lush, see-the-dew-on-the-rose-petals HDTV. The rest looked like anything you'd see with a satellite dish.
The whole experience brought me back to the 1960s transition from black-and-white to color television. Big, ugly rooftop antennas. Limited programming.
Day 1: I was set up
Years of successfully connecting various devices to televisions - VCRs, game consoles, digital-video-disc players and camcorders - lulled me into a false sense of security about the ease of connecting an HDTV. That is why I permitted two marketing guys - one representing monitor maker Princeton Technologies, the other, Ultralink Products - to hook up my new HDTV.
I realized I had misjudged the situation when these two guys, breathing heavily, dropped the 300-pound TV monitor into my entertainment center, carving a gouge across the surface of the custom-made cabinet.
The next five hours confirmed my fears, as the two men puzzled over hooking up the five Miller & Kreisel speakers to the Yamaha RX V3000 audio tuner - and its 66 audio and video inputs and outputs - to the Princeton monitor and the HDTV tuner. All without benefit of the installation manual.
When they had concluded their handiwork, the speakers would play theater-quality audio - whether or not the television was on. And the high-definition part of the HDTV - the whole reason for installing the set - did not work at all.
Lesson 1: Connecting a high-definition television is no task for the Home Depot amateur crowd. This requires a professional.
Day 2: Get help
You've known guys like Bruce Champion since high school. They're the ones who ran the movie projectors. Champion is a professional installer called in to solve this mess. It takes all day.
He climbs onto the roof to install a special Terk digital-TV antenna. It looks nothing like the rooftop antennas of yesteryear, with their spindly metal branches. This is sleek and aerodynamic - like a modern version of the airplane propeller. And it comes with its own power source.
Champion attaches the antenna to the receiver and, after some modest tweaking, manages to coax a high-definition picture from the monitor. It's the vivid, nearly three-dimensional picture I expect - with one significant defect.
It's green - all green.
Champion is much too polite to curse. He merely shakes his head and begins rewiring all the components. By dinnertime, he has the television working harmoniously with the receiver, the speakers and the antenna.
We scan the airwaves for digital-television signals. Although Champion had installed an identical antenna at home less than a mile away to stunning results, I was less fortunate. We found only a single digital channel: the CBS affiliate.
Shall we say I'm no fan of "Touched by an Angel"?
Day 3: tuning in
Champion arrives the next day with a new Winegard antenna that never makes it to the rooftop. We notice the box says it's "digital ready" - a frustrating misnomer. Suffice to say: It won't be ready to receive digital signals anytime soon.
Champion returns with a descendant of those big aluminum antennas from the 1960s. It's from RCA. It costs a mere $40. It works, tuning in five digital channels: the NBC and ABC affiliates, PBS and two Spanish channels showing dubbed black-and-white classics.
Champion programs the Princeton remote control, which is about as intuitive as a set of assembly instructions from Ikea. He offers me a quick tutorial and leaves his home phone number in the event of further technical difficulties.
The finale
Neighbors and friends start showing up to see high-definition television. I expected the same kind of awestruck reaction I had when I saw the aquarium at the consumer-electronics trade show.
I was disappointed.
"I guess you really have to be into TV," said one neighbor, who said he couldn't see much improvement over cable television.
There's a simple explanation for this obvious lack of enthusiasm: scant high-definition programming.
Both NBC's and ABC's broadcasts appear to be the same signal, converted for digital transmission. The subtle differences in clarity and color sharpness were noticeable only when I switched between digital channels and cable television to point out the contrast.
Conversely, the problems with the digital signal were glaringly obvious. When I tuned in ABC's "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire," the on-screen picture trailed the sound, like some Godzilla-inspired English-language dub. Changing channels caused the picture to momentarily fracture into pixels, as if to deliberately scramble the actors' true identities.
Often, the video would freeze for no apparent reason.
Only PBS afforded a glimpse of television's digital future. Late at night, KCET broadcast high-definition still-life portraits of fields of flowers that were so vivid and rich in detail, I could see dew hanging on the daffodils and peer through the fragile, translucent wings of an insect perched on a bud.
My 9-year-old son, Alex, looked up from his Calvin & Hobbes book long enough to remark, "Mom. That's beautiful."
If only it were all that good.
Copyright © 2001 The Seattle Times Company
Excel - Greg
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