DigitalLife HDTV Special

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Dish 942 HDTV PVR - First LookAfter last week's comedy of errors, DishNetwork came out today and hooked up (among other less interesting receivers) my Dishplayer 942. I've had an HDTV for about 2 1/2 years now, but have never bothered to get an HD tuner (if I couldn't have a PVR, I wasn't interested), so this was also my first look at real genuine HD in my living room. Okay, first up, a warning -- stay away from HD. For the first ten minutes, it looks stunningly gorgeous. Then it looks normal. After that, all of the non-HD content you watch like looks like crap. All kidding aside, it took about 10 minutes for me to get on the "everything needs to be in HD...


The HDTV Confusion FactorEverybody is publishing articles attempting to (hopefully) stem some of the confusion in the holiday HDTV buying season. . A friend of mine who has been asking for advice recently just mailed me a link to this BusinessWeek article, and asked for my thoughts on the article and comments, and I figured I might as well share my reply here. "Most of the people in the comments were either confused, confusing, or both... Not surprising, because it's a confusing topic. There are two topics that always seem to get conflated, the native resolution of the display, and the resolution of signal accepted by the display, which is then up-sampled or down-sampled as necessary to achieve the native resolution. 400i -...


5 things not to look for in HDTV - Plus or Minus 4Over at The F-Stop Blues, Tim Coyle has listed his "Top 5 Things NOT to Look For in a New HTDV", and it's a well-thought-out list. Or it would be a couple of years from now. Unless your real-world situation is a lot different than mine, you might want to think a little more about a couple of these. "Forget about all other connections besides HDMI" -- To be sure, I wouldn't buy a set today that didn't have an HDCP compliant HDMI port (preferably two, but that's just getting greedy); odds are very good that in a couple of years, you'll need them to be able to watch overly-DRM'd content. On the other hand, I want the widest variety...


VBox Cat’s Eye USB 3560 HDTV Receiver ReviewI recently got an opportunity to play with the VBox "Cat's Eye" USB 3560 HDTV (ATSC) Receiver. The unit itself is very small -- about 50% bigger overall than a deck of playing cards -- and couldn't really be simpler. It has a coax connector for attatching your antenna to, a USB connector that attaches to the PC, and a little stand to hold it vertical (should you so desire). In fact, outside of the USB cable and the driver/documentation CD, there's not anything else in the box, even. The good news is that you don't need much else. Throwing caution to the wind, I tossed the CD in the drive, attached the coax from my roof antenna, and plugged...


HDTV - How To Connect Multiple DevicesIf you read the article on Basic HDTV Cabling, you may have noticed that I didn't answer part of the original question there -- namely, "how do you hook up multiple program sources (cable boxes, DVD players, etc.) to the same HDTV?" To have multiple sources, you're going to need to have a way of switching between them. Fortunately, for most HDTV sets, there are multiple sources of inputs, and you can switch between them via the TV's own remote. Deciding what to plug in where The hard part is often deciding just what device to plug into each input. Going back once again to the cabling article, you'll notice that some cabling choices give better quality results than others....