The Digital Transition - My Experience With DTV Converters

To my wonder there is some confusion to what the different television standards mean. ATSC standards are currently what is known DTV but some of them like 720 and 1080 are what are known as high definition television or HD television or whatever term you want to call it.There are different standars for eache resolution. These standards are much higher that those that will be decoded by DTV boxes. Those that will be decoded by those boxes are the that are mostly similar in resolution to old analog NTSC standards that are known as SDTV. Do not be confused by these terms they are different in everything from the screen's aspect ratio to the amount of pixels and depending on the particular case even the way that images are parsed on the screen. Now if you have an old analog television set and want it to be useful after the summer tv transition you have to buy a converter box not anything related to HDTV. Just remember that these boxes are useful to watch broadcasts that you would commonly receive through your normal antenna. Not satellite or DirecTV stuff. If you get a coupon, the DTV box will cost you around $40 dollars but if not, you will have to pay $80 or probably even a little more.

From my personal testing, I can say that DTV does look better than analog and there is quite a noticeable drop in the amount of interference that used to be introduced into my television set through the antenna. In the worst cases the image gets a little blocky but it is an improvement over the color distortion and the prominent ghosting that used to affect the image I received. I am also able to watch channels that I could not previously which is strange if you consider that the transition was delayed for the sole reason that people were receiving less channels than they used to. If this happens to you I suggest that you get an antenna with a higher gain. Just do your own testing first.