🚀 go-pugleaf

  It must be really frustrating trying to come up w/ a HDTV standard:  I mean
these guys (the ones making the standard) have to come up with the LAST WORD
in TV standards.  The standard has to be something we're willing to live with 
for AT LEAST the next 50 years!  Sure, 50 years from now, the things will be
cheap to make, but now they're going to be VERY expensive.  Especially if they
make no compromises so we'll still be happy with the standard in 50 years...

  But you know all that.

  I'd be perfectly happy to settle for the telivision picture tubes of today!
It's the signal that's so horrendous!  I mean:  If you've ever seen the
output of a laser disc player, it's awesome!  It shows what your picture tube
can do.  It's the low signal to noise ratio of the broadcast signals that we
receive that's horrendous!

  I commend the FCC for requiring that the new format signals be backwards
compatible, but I think that the standard could easily offer more than just
backwards compatibility.  Here's what I mean:

+----+--------------+----+    I've heard of one standard which would break
|    |              |    |  your picture into at least four signals:  First
| A  |      B/C     | D  |  a standard TV picture is sent (B).  This provides 
|    |              |    |  the requisite backwards compatibility.  Then 
|    |              |    |  image C is sent.  This image is interlaced between
|    |              |    |  the lines from picture B.  Third, zones A&D are
+----+--------------+----+  sent to provide HDTC users w/ a movie-box picture.

  If a standard such as this were adopted (which I highly doubt it would),
there would be an EASILY EXTRACTED HD IMAGE OF THE NORMAL PICTURE.  Ok, so
it's not exactly the same image (It's the line in-between the normal NTSC
lines), but it could easily be extracted.  And if images A,C,&D are sent
digitally w/ error correction, a (relatively) cheap tuner could be built
to extract the high-quality image C, convert it to analog, and display this
VIRTUALLY NOISE-FREE picture on your old TV!

  This way, consumers would have a choice of three levels of TV quality,
depending upon what they could afford:  They could use the cheap old NTSC,
or the crisp new digital NTSC, or the dramatic full-performance HDTV!

  I personally don't think the above standard will (or even should) be 
implemented as I have described it, But I highly encourage the HDTV Standards
Committee to use a format which includes an easily tuned digital encoding
of the current NTSC signal.

--Glenn