Reason you first desired HDTV ?

That was the disappointing part, waiting. Olympics in HD finally came with Beijing Games and I missed the opening ceremonies.

 

My first HDTV was the 34” Sony XBR CRT … almost 200 pounds. The primary reason was to watch golf … especially ‘The Masters’.

 

I had a rear projection that was going bad. Kept taking longer and longer to warm up and work properly.

Wound up buying a 48" Toshiba that I still use today in the basement.

 

The release of Star Trek The Original Series season one on blu-ray is what got me to upgrade my TV and player.

 

I guess I should tell why I got my first actual HDTV display (which was only a display with an NTSC receiver). It was a 34" Toshiba LCD and it still works. For a year I was watching HDTV on my 19" computer monitor because HD displays were still over $3,000. Then my cat who loved to sleep on top of the warm television suddenly decided to barf into the top vents and destroy it. So I justified buying a flat screen because my cat couldn't barf into one of those.

 

A VPR-2 for home? Call me impressed, I worked with those when they were current.
My first encounter with HD was at NAB probably about '89 or so. Sony had a prototype BVH-3000 1" playing back material at 1035i that IIRC was produced in conjunction with the NHK. I recall being sufficiently impressed by it. Jump ahead about 10-12 years, and the company I was working for began using the newly developed Sony F900 CineAlta cameras. 1080@24P had become a viable alternative to shooting on film for many, (George Lucas for one) and we were the kids on the block doing all of this work in our market. I was engineering these things, watching pretty pictures on a regular basis.
Needless to say, I was spoiled early on and couldn't wait for HD to trickle into our homes.

 

Reason #1 - To see them pixels better.

 

Sports.

Couldn't care less about tv and not much about movies.

 

I think they still had something like a 3000 running 1" HD for years after that!

Yes, I have a VPR-2B, along with an 80 and a 6 with the 3 hour Merlin mod. Long story, but there can't be many 6s with the Merlin in existence.


Dan

 

We started working on HD shows in LA back in 1999, so the moment I could afford an HD set (analog, unfortunately) I ran out and bought one. I think we wound up with a Sharp HD projector, followed by a ridiculously-expensive Sony HD front projector, a Pioneer rear-screen projector, and a Sony rear-screen projector in different rooms, by 2000-2001 or so. The first broadcast show I can remember watching in HD was The West Wing on NBC, in September of 2001. Very exciting to see it in widescreen 16x9 more than 20 years ago. And I think the first videotape show we saw was The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, around the same time, plus a few sports events.

We resisted getting any of the Sony CRT HD sets because of the size, weight, and heat issue. At work, we did use Sony BVM-32 HD monitors for video mastering for more than 10 years -- they were the standard of the industry for a long, long time, until flat screen / plasma / OLED took over.



Those were heavy mofos: about 300 pounds, took 4 guys to move them, and they cost about $20,000 in 1998. Also very complex to setup, align, and calibrate. If you moved them 2 feet, they went out of whack. Very sensitive sets. We used them for both standard-def and HD mastering for many years, I think about until 2012 or so.

 

My jump into HDTV was out of necessity more than anything else. Needed to replace my old Panasonic 27" CRT and purchased a 40" Samsung HDTV which is still in use today (but slowly starting to kick the bucket).

 

It was Spring 2005. We'd been to stores and been dazzled with widescreen DVD images filling up the screen. I think the one that really got to us was a store display showing FINDING NEMO on a DVD and it looked so incredible compared to our Sony CRT at home. So we shopped some more and whittled our choice down to what they called a rear projection LCD Sony. It was 55" in picture size and seemed huge. Yet our old 32" Sony CRT weighed SO-O much more.

I was more intrigued with its display capability for home video, and totally forgot about broadcast TV in high definition. We got to experience that summer when the high def signals were being separately sent out over other broadcast channels, and the prime time lineups were just becoming "all-high-def." It was fun to see our favorite shows without all of the network promo bugs and logos that summer. By fall, they all merged everything into one feed and the SD just tagged along with the HD.

 

I can relate. The company I worked for also had the Merlin mod, although it was on a Sony BVH-1100. Speaking of Merlin, we also had the Merlin 888 standards converter back in the mid 80’s, first standards converter in our region. It sure helped my private video collection being able to acquire tapes from overseas.

 

The beauty of sports, it’s a live transmission, no archival, storage related compression artifacts to worry about. If it’s off the air as opposed to cable, even better. Watching the recent Stanley Cup games is pure eye candy from a technical standpoint.

 

I do it “not” to see the pixels better.

 

My 32" Sony wega screen had turned pinky purple, it had lasted a few good years but by 2011 it was ridiculous and 'Doctor Who' was had been broadcast in HD for two whole years and I'd just got a few blu rays and a PS3. Enough was enough, it was time for HD!

 

I bought a 47" Samsung thirteen years ago and it looks better today than when I bought it because I eventually figured out how to calibrate it correctly. It does look better than my twenty year old Toshiba but even that one still looks pretty good.

People keep telling me televisions these days are made to run for a few years and then be thrown into the garbage. After a few years my Quasar CRT TV that I bought in the late 80s was getting so dim I had to have it repaired and even that didn't completely fix it and it got dim again in just a couple more years. All of my HDTVs are working as well as the day I bought them.

 

The other problem that HDTV solved was the ghosting inherent in analog television. We were then, as now, not cable subscribers, so getting digital signals over the air was an eye-opener as there were no longer any ghosts around images that had been there before.

 

It appears that 2007-2010 was the sunset. I bought my first 58” Samsun

Thank you. The Philadelphia delegate was looking forward to your post.

 

This was the best analog reception I could get of my NBC station at my house with a directional antenna:

And that's why I paid for cable.

 

We had a straight line-of-site to the main towers and got better over-the-air reception, but even then, there was ghosting on a couple of the channels. Our channel 3 was always the ghostiest - and 29, the STAR TREK channel had a minor ghost to the right. Oh - and cable was just as bad.

 

Got HDTV for NFL Football. Not a follower anymore, but those old b&w Warner Brothers
movies (remastered) look sure great.

 

Eh. They asked, I responded.

Technically, June 2009 was the official Analog Sunset for the U.S. A lot of people feared there would be rioting in the streets, dogs & cats sleeping together, mass insanity, but instead it was a pretty orderly transition. One problem to overcome is that HDMI became the only connector that would work with new sets, and god help you if you had analog gear or the early HD models with only analog connectors.

Digital television transition - Wikipedia

 

The Jones family across the street got one and we just had to keep up.

 

Those are the same ones we had for years and years where I worked. Great picture on them.


Dan