As of right now, all full power television stations are providing their service over the air as an analog signal and through cable companies as a digital signal.  The analog signal can be received by any TV using an antenna (rabbit ears) similar to how your radio works in your car, while the digital signal can only be received by a TV with a digital tuner or through cable / satellite service.   The DTV 2009 switch will require all analog signals to be stopped and only digital signals will be provided. This means if you only use an antenna to receive your TV stations, you will lose this service unless you sign up for cable / satellite or get a DTV converter box.

Now the government is providing 2 coupons each worth $40 towards the purchase of certified DTV converter boxes.  These boxes will simply convert a television signal coming into your house into a digital television or DTV signal.

The reason the government is requiring all stations to switch over to an all digital signal is to clear the airwaves for emergency services and provide television viewers a clearer picture on their TVs.  This will ensure that emergency responders have a clear signal to use in case of a disaster.

The DTV switch is causing a lot of confusion and hopefully this will clear that up.  You do not need to buy a new TV or even sign up for cable as long as you get a DTV converter box from your local retail store.  Make sure you check out the government’s web page on DTV 2009 and make sure you get the correct DTV converter box.  You can visit the DTV 2009 site here.

Do you still use an antenna to receive your TV stations? Leave a comment and tell us what you think of the DTV switch.

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• Let’s talk about HDTV

For those of you who don’t know what OLED means, it stands for Organic Light Emitting Diodes and it is an emerging technology in the HDTV industry. OLEDs allow for ultra thin screens that use very small amounts of electricity to run them.

One question that can be brought up is about other applications these OLEDs can be used for besides televisions. Since OLEDs are ultra thin, they are semi-pliable, giving hope that we will someday have screens that can wrap around pillars in a subway station that are capable of showing advertisements.

Or imagine carrying your entire presentation for work on something as thin as a sheet of paper that will display bright crisp color graphs and charts. OLEDs are paving the way for this to become a reality in the near future.

Power consumption in OLEDs should also be less than your conventional TV or plasma which will help with saving energy and reducing your monthly electric bill, unless you are running a data center or home theater that rivals the local movie theater.

All in all OLEDs are good news for all of us as they will most likely drive the price down on plasmas and LCDs. So hang on to your money for right now and wait until these to reach the market, and hopefully in a few years we will see a price drop for today’s HDTVs.

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Here is an image of the DLP chip made by Texas instruments.    As you can see on the left, there is a silver space in the middle of the chip, that is actually a set of tiny mirrors that will reflect the light to the screen of the TV.  You can read more about this technology over at Texas Instrument’s DLP page.

Here is an image of how the color of light is determined and reflected off of the mirrors.

  DLP technology is allowing for very large size screens to be built which can range from 42 inches, up to 61 inches and this will only grow as technology advances and they figure out how to get the image to retain its quality as the sizes grow larger.

One downside to owning a DLP television is that the bulb has to be replaced after a few thousand hours and can cost a few hundred dollars, depending on the model of the TV and the type of bulb used.

That’s all for DLP, the next time you are planning on upgrading your tv to a HDTV, consider buying a DLP TV, as their prices are slightly lower than a plasma TV and the picture quality is fairly comparable.

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For live programs, anything that is spoken throughout the broadcast is transcribed by a person using stenotype or steno mask type of machines, and then the phonetic output is instantly translated into text by a computer and displayed on the screen. This is similar to the stenographer at a court hearing.  Can you imagine how fast these people have to type to get the words up fast enough to even come close to people talking?

For pre-recorded programs the captions are prepared by the broadcaster or closed caption company and are positioned on the screen and timed for the audio, this way they match up as closely as they can get them.

So the next time you are watching your HDTV, you’ll know how they get those little black boxes with words in them to appear on your screen.

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First of all, the term HDTV stands for High Definition TeleVision, and it means that the picture displayed on the screen is usually crisper and clearer that your standard tube TV. Let’s figure out what some of the differences are between the two. I am going to keep this as simple as I can, for there are many different characteristics that make up each type of TV.

Your standard TV has the following attributes:

- Interlaced image drawing

- 4:3 aspect ratio

- 480i resolution

HDTV sets have these features:

- Progressive scan image drawing

- 16:9 aspect ratio

- 480p, 720p, 1080i, and 1080p resolutions

Now I’m going to try and break each of those terms down so you can understand what they mean, and then how they apply to the different types of television sets. I’ll start with image drawing.

Interlaced means that the picture is drawn to your TV screen every other line, and then the TV goes back and draws the remaining lines to fill in the picture. This happens every second, and you can imagine that leaving some of the picture out for half of a second can make your picture quality look a little dull. Sounds a little confusing? Maybe drawing it out will help. NOTE: TV’s draw in a vertical fashion, but that wouldn’t look right as a drawing, so I’m going to do it with horizontal lines to illustrate the principle of how it works.

An interlaced image will begin drawing like this:

——————————————

Notice this space?

——————————————

And this one?

——————————————

After those lines of the picture are drawn, your TV will go back and fill in the lines like this:

——————————————

——————————————

——————————————

——————————————

——————————————

Don’t worry, progressive scan is easier to understand and makes your picture quality better. Progressive scan draws the entire picture as a whole to the screen every second. See now that wasn’t so hard.

Your aspect ratios are what shape the picture will be, 4:3 is a square that is slightly taller than it is wide, 16:9 is a wide rectangle, or widescreen. There is a more technical explanation for aspect ratios but we are going to keep it simple for now.

Finally you have your resolutions, feel free to glance back up and take note of the numbers listed above in the beginning of this post. The numbers 480, 720 and 1080 all represent how many vertical lines the TV will draw each time it updates the picture. The letters that follow them, i and p, stand for interlaced and progressive. Aha it’s all starting to make sense now isn’t it? Basically if your TV has 1080i, it will draw 1080 lines on the screen, in a half and half pattern as I explained before. 1080p however, will draw all 1080 lines on the TV at once!

For those of you brave enough to put this knowledge to the test, here are some links for you to learn more in depth about the topics discussed in this post

Wikipedia’s entry for 1080p

Wikipedia’s entry for HDTV

• Have you seen my DLP?
• Sony confirms OLED by December 1st
• Blu-Ray or HD-DVD, choose your disc.
• Closed Captions provided by…
• DTV 2009