Why procrastinate on the DTV transition?

So I requested the coupons for two converter boxes, bought them and installed them. (And I've had a 720p digital TV set since September of last year). Now Congress is about to approve delaying the shut-off of full-power analog TV transmission from February 17 to June 12. The Senate has already voted in favor of the delay, according to the Washington Post, and the House is expected to rubber-stamp it; President Obama will almost certainly sign it because he asked Congress to consider the delay in the first place. I agree with almost everything else Obama has done so far: shut down Gitmo, ban torture, restore access to ex-presidential records, etc.

But delaying the DTV transition seems poorly justified. If after all those obnoxious advertisements reminding you to circle February 17 on your calendar, and the annoying DTV Tuesday tests urging you to run up and down your house in one minute to check every TV in your house, you still aren't ready for the transition, you're a procrastinator. It's true that many things about the converter coupons haven't been explained that well, like, for example, what is the cost of making them? They're plastic cards, not paper or cardboard.

I took a picture of one of them before using it. Look at it: it looks nicer than my Capital One credit card! (I've blurred the number and blacked out the bar code, but still). The coupons I bought were valid until practically April, and I got them just a couple of weeks ago. So, if I hadn't used my coupons when I got them, I would still have two full months in which to go down to Best Buy or CVS or Radio Shack or whatever and buy a converter box. It is a little suspicious that most places only carry one or at most two brands of converter boxes (the CVS I went to only had Craig, whereas Best Buy had Insignia and Apex). I'll say more about converter boxes in another post.

Let's not forget about new televisions. They have to have digital tuners anyway. If you can't afford 1080p, you can probably afford 720p, they put them on sale every once in a while. It probably is now time to replace a lot of TV sets in nursing homes, for example. And digital transmission has actually improved over the past few weeks. I actually had the antenna of my digital TV in one position for almost all week last week and I was able to tune in all the Detroit channels, even 7-1, 7-2 and 7-3 (but still no 50-1). Snowflakes still affect digital transmission, but now a simple movement of the antenna is all it takes to fix it, as opposed to the frustrating dance required last year. Like Rob Pegoraro of the Washington Post, I don't need any outdoor antennae (maybe for 50-1, but I would only watch Simpsons reruns on that channel, and all the good episodes are now available on DVD – they ought to cancel that show, but that's another issue altogether), indoor antennae do just fine. Now that digital transmission is more reliable, the increased image quality of digital TV is well worthwhile. Watching Obama's inauguration, it almost felt like I could've counted the 1.8 million people crowding the area in front of the Capitol (2 million, by Nancy Pelosi's count) if I had wanted to. Mathematically I know that a 720p display does not have the resolution to distinctly show the tops of the heads of even a million people, but it's still a huge improvement over 480i.

What about content producers? Think about not just the big studios, but also local production companies. Having to produce both high-resolution digital content and downsampled analog content has got to be quite a hassle. We've left 1.44MB floppy disks far in the past. It's time to do the same for analog TV.

DTV has "clearer picture and better sound"... if you can get it to come in

So I've had a digital TV with ATSC tuner for about four months now. And yet, when Channel 7 broadcast their DTV education special yesterday, I watched almost the whole damn thing on analog. That's because here in Detroit, by the Ambassador Bridge, Channel 7's digital channels still have the second worst reception of all digital channels. Only Channel 50-1 is worse: I got it to show up in the channel scan, but its signal level remains stuck at 0 no matter what I do to the antenna. I suppose that, in a way, that's better than Channel 7. Sometimes you get lucky and 7-1 suddenly comes in. But then the wind blows a little, the image gets stuck and then it just goes to black. I've tried to wean myself off of using the analog reception as a guide for digital reception, because after February 17, it's not going to be available. Finding reception for some channels will be like trying to find water with a twig.

I mentioned last year that I had given up on RCA antennae and gone with a Philips antenna. Of that Philips, I broke off the left "ear" and twisted the right "ear." Channel 20-1 comes in almost no matter what I do to the antenna. Channels 4-1 and 62-1 have been fairly reliable with my specially broken antenna, requiring only minor antenna adjustments, as soon as I put the antenna in a position that's worked before, the channel comes in. Channel 2-1 has been OK, but besides Sunday "Animation Domination," is there anything on that channel? (Right, football, the art of the time-out). So Best Buy, forget it if you still want me to shell out $100 for an amplified unidirectional antenna that might not even work anyway. You'd have to pay me a $100 to give it a try. Nor will I shell out $70 each for converter boxes for the remaining analog TVs in my house (I'm still waiting on the rebate coupon, supposedly they mailed it January 2).

DTV does offer more channels than analog. It's actually useful to have a 24-hour weather channel, so I'm not happy about Channel 4 ditching their 24-hour weather channel and replacing it with a 7-2 knockoff (old movies and TV shows at 480i, which on a 1080i screen looks rather crappy and JPEG-artifacty). At least WXYZ still has a weather channel (at 7-3), but it's useless if you can't get it to come in, and when it finally does come in, it gives you the weather for Albuquerque and then drops out before swinging back to Michigan.