Reason you first desired HDTV ?

I’m a vidiot.

 

See, but that's the paradox; it's to see the pixals in a more "natural" way, yet to not "see" the pixels, even though we know that we're still looking at pixels.

 

HDTVs are cool. I am cool. You do the math.

 

I do not like HDTV,the pic is too big!

I prefer Standard and I always have

 

Puck

 

The very week that our Sony HDTV was delivered and set up in our house was the week after STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE had aired its last episode finale. I had known that the show was broadcast in HD, but missed seeing any of the episodes. At that point, all I had were digital recordings from the analog channel. UPN didn't rerun any of the series that summer - they were happy to be rid of it I believe.

 

Two cool!

 

screen size, clarity...

 

well the 60's were golden, come on! ; )

 

Just an upgrade from a Panasonic Viera. That might have been HD too I think but wasn't conscious of it.

I actually just wanted a "smart" TV which had enough sockets for two Humax recorders, a Virgin Tivo box, A CD/DVD player and my VHS recorder/player.

 

Two cool = many cold as ice experiences.

 

It was DVDs for me!

 

That I will agree with.

 

I wanted a better picture

 

that's cool!; )

 

Star Trek: Enterprise started off shooting on 3-perf 35mm negative film (as did many Hollywood TV dramas of that period) and doing the post in HD. By season 4 (2004-2005), they realized that film was starting to go away, so they started shooting the show on a Sony Cinealta HD camera, similar to what George Lucas had done in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith. But all the Enterprise shows were at least initially aired in HD, assuming the local station had an HD transmitter.

I think everybody was disappointed with the show; I worked with one of the producers a year later, and he told me he felt it was a case of "too many cooks in the kitchen," so a lot of creative decisions made were compromises.

 

Sports…

 

Yeah, ENTERPRISE had its problems, but as a long-time Trekfan, being able to see any STAR TREK product in high definition would have been a treat. And I missed that experience by one week. Recall that after that, there was zero STAR TREK on the air anywhere, other than older SD reruns - for ages. Still, even now, the only new STAR TREK product here in the US is the streaming series on Paramount+. CBS did air season one of DISCOVERY during the pandemic. And unless you get your MeTV and H&I channels in HD (most do not), all of those STAR TREK shows are still going out in SD.

NEXT GENERATION seems to run endlessly on a Pluto channel stream, and it looks HD to me. But I rely on my Blu-rays of the original series, the next generation, and Enterprise. DS9 and Voyager remain stuck in SD on DVD.

 

Well, TNG, Enterprise, and even the 1960s remastered Star Trek are all in HD on Paramount+. And Star Trek: Strange New Worlds is of course in 4K Dolby Vision and also HD. The very Trek-like Orville is also in 4K HDR now on Hulu.

Interesting side note: fans will quibble that Strange New Worlds is supposed to take place about 20 years prior to Captain Kirk's career on the Enterprise. But the ship itself reflects very cutting edge 2022 technology, including massive screens, lots of iPad-like devices, glass monitors that kind of "float" above the consoles, a bridge section about the size of a football field, and effects that wouldn't be out of place in a $100 million dollar blockbuster. Enterprise had the same problem: it was supposed to be 100 years prior to Captain Kirk's time, when the transporter didn't yet work and all their technology was quite primitive... but it still looked a lot slicker and more advanced than anything in the 1960s show. I kind of laugh at the old-school communicators, tricorders, and phasers they do still use in Strange New Worlds... but ya know, the show is a lot of fun and many of the stories would have fit very well with the old 1960s show.

In the 2000s, we called them "Panasonic Viagra" sets, just to be sarcastic. My memory is that this was their high-end line intended to compete with Sony's "XBR" deluxe sets, and they had both standard-def and HD models. One problem with all the sets made in the 2000s: almost none of them had more than one HDMI input (if that), and nowadays we need a minimum of 3 or 4 HDMI inputs to handle all the possible viewing choices these days. We have an HD Blu-ray player, a 4K Blu-ray player, an Apple TV 4K box, DirecTV satellite, and I think a Roku box somewhere in a drawer. Very tough to hook everything up.

 

If I forgot to mention that, I was concentrating on broadcast TV. I know that's anachronistic to many, but there are lots of antenna TV-watchers.

 

I give the new story-tellers credit for not forcing everything back into 1960s tech. While it's in the past for Kirk and company, it's very far in the future for us. And they give us a great look at what the Enterprise and its tech should look like to those of is in the here and now.

 

After they stopped making tube tvs, or reliable ones, we bought a 40" tv that seemed like HD. Then the cable company started offering HD tv. Well, all of a sudden that new tv didn't look as sharp on the non-HD channels. To make sure they could charge more, only the HD channels come in full screen.

 

Ooh, I remember being in a store and learning that the TV manufacturers were coming out with some sort of enhanced SD. I believe it did some sort of line doubling with interpolated info on the in-between lines. This was only a few years before the advent of HDTV. I'm glad we didn't go there and buy some expensive tech that would become outdated in a few years.

 

I had read about the progress of HDTV in Broadcasting, mostly concerning NHK and CBS's efforts, since around 1978, but it was not until the 1993 Masters that I first saw high-definition television. Augusta National Golf Club brought in the only HD mobile unit in North America for an experimental telecast that would only be seen in the clubhouse and the media building.

It was stationed by the 15th and 16th greens, precisely where CBS parked its second unit trucks in the era when cable runs were short and that unit covered 15, 16 and the first half of the 17th holes. The HD truck had five cameras, two on 15 and three on 16. John Derr, who had covered the Masters for CBS radio and TV from the second playing in 1935 into the 1960s (and in the summer of 1956 managed to heist the Masters broadcast rights from NBC when Augusta decided 1956 was the time to add TV coverage), was brought in to add commentary.

In the media building, a Sony HD projection set was set up next to the Sony SD projection set. It was like night and day. When CBS SD was covering 15 or 16 and the camera shots lined up, the inferiority of the NTSC picture was evident – and CBS always went the extra mile to make Augusta look good. You could see the weave in a player's sweater, individual grains of sand in the bunker, and the color range was far superior to standard television.

Everyone who saw it wanted HD as soon as possible. I asked what the HD set cost. About $50,000, I was told, and there was a smaller HD CRT in the clubhouse dining room that went for $25,000 – in Japan. (A few weeks later, that same HD truck, from Toronto, was at Chicago Stadium. The NBA wanted some HD footage of Michael Jordan in action and so recorded an entire game for posterity.)

I was back at Augusta a few years later, before the CBS HD telecasts – separate from SD the first couple of years – began, and highlights of the 1993 footage was running on an HD monitor via a HiVision laser player. It was as impressive the second time around.

I got onboard with the original Panasonic HD receiver and the separate HD (Digital VHS) recorder, feeding a Panasonic HD-capable projection set that had only an NTSC tuner.

 

One of the biggest mysteries in history of American HDTV is something called ACTV. It was invented by RCA in the late 80s to transmit a sort of widescreen picture (14:9) on a regular NTSC signal by sending the widescreen parts during the blanking intervals since about 25% of the time an NTSC signal isn't transmitting any picture information. It wasn't HDTV but it was 100% backwards compatible and supposed to be good enough until they developed a real HDTV system. Reports said that the sides of the widescreen picture were obviously less than NTSC resolution and it was hard to watch. Sadly RCA destroyed everything related to ACTV so we don't even have an example to look at.