HDTV questions

[DVDRunner]

Well my parents have added a new room to our house and I convinced them to put in a small Home Theater. They went shopping and saw a Hitachi HDTV at Circuit City have their hearts set on it now. But the guy at CC said they might need a set top decoder and a satellite service to receive the HD stations. Our local cable service provides digital cable and I was wondering if we would still need the decoder and the satellite stuff to get everything running.

The model number for the 32" Hitachi TV is 32UDX10S. It's listed on the Curcuit City if you need to see anything there.

So what I need to know is
- Will we need any type of separate decoder, and
- will we need to go with a satellite dish or antenna to receive HD stations?

Any help will be greatly appreciated.

[egbok]

You will need a separate HD decoder, it cost around $500 - $1000, depends on the brand name (Panasonic, Sony, Mitsubishi, Samsung...).

I believe that DirectTV only has 2 HD channels (HBO and HDNet). You need an UHF antenna (Radio Shack 2 bowties is the best, imo) to receive OTA HDTV. ABC, NBC, CBS, and PBS are broadcasting in HD now (depends on your city).

Hope this helps.

[skar]

You will only need the digital cable box your cable company provides to receive digital cable.

Note that digital cable is nowhere near the picture quality of HDTV and will probably look average to poor on a TV of this quality.

Satellite TV is something I would look into even without an HD decoder.

[Geofferson]

If by chance, your cable company is Time Warner Cable, they do offer HD service...and best of all, it doesn't require any decoder.

We had digital cable. They just replaced our digital cable receiver with a HD receiver and we were good to go. :up:

[DVDRunner]

Thanks for the replies. Another quick question. We have a Progressive scan toshiba dvd player (sd-4700 I believe). If this is plugged into the HD component video inputs, can we make use of the progressive scan?

We have cox communications digital cable around here so I guess we will need to get a box somewhere down the road.

[Berkowitz]

You should have a seperate set of Component inputs on the TV just for 480P. The DTV inputs are for 480,720 and 1080.

I am in a condo so Sat is out of the question. My local Comcast has not heard anything about HDTV. So I went the OTA route. I have a Zenith DTV1080 unit on my Mitsubishi ws65908 and a Sony SAT HD100 on my Sony 32XBR450

I use a 45db RCA unit and it workes pretty good. The HDTV loop on PBS is my main ref material. CBS is good(no NBC or ABC, because of the 9-11 tragedy) Fow and UPN both have digital feeds, but they are only dvd quality and are 4:3. Some shows on FOX are in 16x9, but only 480. CBS(2-1) transmit all primetime in 16x9 DD, HDTV. But the late night shows are in 4:3??? Who knows. Some jerk at CBS forgets to flip the HD switch every night!! I am going to call down there!!

Guest are floored that this is on TV!!! It looks better then any DVD I own. I only wish I could safely crank up the contrast and brightness and it would be even better.