Friday, August 24, 2007

The Digital Era

I was researching DVRs and DVD-Recorders on Amazon and saw this on a DVD-Recorder:

CONSUMER ALERT:
This television receiver has only an analog broadcast tuner and will require a converter box after February 17, 2009 to receive over-the-air broadcasts with an antenna because of the U.S.'s transition to digital broadcasting. Analog-only TVs should continue to work as before with cable and satellite TV services, gaming consoles, VCRs, DVD players, and similar products. For more information, call the Federal Communications Commission at 1-888-225-5322 (TTY: 1-888-835-5322), or visit the commission’s digital-television Web site at: www.dtv.gov.

I had heard talks of the end of analog signal last year, but I didn't know there was a finite date. Interesting.. very interesting!

3 comments:

CrankyBeach said...

Heh. Wonder if you were looking at the same one I got?

http://coffee.ondragonswing.com/archives/000594.html

Samantha said...

That one looks cool. What do you think of it? Unfortunately, it looks like it's not available at least from Amazon.

CrankyBeach said...

Seems fine to me. Haven't actually used it that much. Was planning to record all the episodes of Drive, but we know how that went. I liked the fact that it works just like a VCR and has an analog tuner, because I still have analog cable. I'm not upgrading that until they make me, mainly because I don't really have time to watch the channels I already get, much less a hundred new ones! And, in order to record analog TV on something other than a VCR, I was not left with many choices. I understand I will be able to get some kind of add-on digital tuner when we are forced to go digital. My TV is the same way; it's an HD monitor with an analog tuner. They're not even broadcasting in HD yet in my neighborhood, so what's the point of upgrading now?