I was in Circuit City the other day and thought the internal "broadcast" image on the screen was pretty good. The sales guy said it wasn't HD, because they only had coax running to each of the TVs. He said it was standard def, but the image is a lot better than any standard def picture i've seen. He set the tv screen to normal and it looked like the image was tall and skinny, so I thought it may be anamorphic. He said that they pick up the image from their head office. I'm not sure if it was over the air, sat or cable.

I know it's possible to get HD "over the air" using just an antenna and coax, so I'm not sure his theory that it's not HD because it's coax is correct.

It has me a little perplexed how they are doing it. This seemed like the best forum to ask this type of question.

Does anyone know what format it is and if it is high def, how would they be making it work?

I asked someone at Best Buy and they said it was playing off a hard drive- not a Tivo but something that works like it. Their instore video always looks like crap- whenever anything moves, like in a football game, everything gets blocky. I'm guessing Circus City is using the same thing; before these came along they were playing DVDs with movie trailers and music videos, and laserdiscs before that (I have a few of those from the early 90s.) Those generally looked good, but splitting the analog signal to all the TVs in the store usually didn't work so well.

I've always been curious about it, too. But saying it isn't HD just because it's coming through coax makes me think that person didn't know what he was talking about. I mean, most (if not all) HD signals come in through coax, either from an OTA antenna, cable, or satellite. Right now, the only way I'm able to get HD is through my cable using a QAM tuner (for some reason I can't get an antenna to pick up anything where I live, and the cable company on the school's campus I am at offers local HD through QAM, so at least I have that). Only thing I have is a coax running to my tuner, then a component cable to my TV (I don't have HDMI ).

Though if you have a cable box and just have it hooked to your TV through coax (setting the TV to Channel 3/4), the HD channels won't be in HD, if they even show up at all. Maybe that's what he means. It all depends on how it's set up.

I'm guessing it's like the BB setup. The only odd thing was that it looked pretty good. When the action got moving it would go blocky, but that happens with HD over cable and Sat.

I'm thinking your right, Obidawsn