[Chuplayer]

Analog TV will die. I got this 7-Up green tube TV that has an old antenna. I'm going to be there for the last TV show on whatever channel I decide to watch.

My family actually used to use over the air antenna TV for much of the 90s. We only had one cable box for many years. Luckily, I was the one with the cable box, so I got to watch 90s Nick all the time :)

What did I watch on the antenna TV? TGIF, Sesame Street, Power Rangers, Star Trek: TNG, news, VR Troopers, and all sorts of stuff that I can't remember right now.

We used this mostly open-air TV stand for our antenna TV, so the antenna had lots of room for play and the application of tinfoil. It was also easy to access the RF switchbox for the Atari 7800. I currently use this TV stand today for that weird late 90s Samsung GXTV gaming television and as a place to hold many of my game consoles. I have my XBOX 1, PS2, GCN, DC, Saturn, and Genesis on it.

Are you going to be there for the end of an era?

[Internetics]

Rockford, which gets all its stations from Grand Rapids, switched months ago. Why pay extra to keep broadcasting analogue AND digital cable when 95% of the area gets it's TV from cable and satellite and the remaining bumpkins who get it free had years to buy a converter or get on a plan.
_________________
"Is Father's Day nine months after Mother's Day, or is it the other way around?"

[Chuplayer]

Fuck the "wah wah let's complain about people using analog TV" stuff. This is a celebration of the way things used to be.

[Laurel Soup]

Low power stations are hanging in there still. So if you're in a major city, you can probably still watch Sanford and Son on it.

[Chuplayer]

This topic is nosediving fast.

[Internetics]

C'mon Chuplayer

There's got to be something we can post about to liven it up?
_________________
"Is Father's Day nine months after Mother's Day, or is it the other way around?"

[Gironika]

A bit sad to see analogue broadcasts on their way out, but what can you do. It was a way more satisfying experience to use a control dial to find a programme than just pressing "ok" and waiting what the box will find.

Obviously the machine can do it better and will be able to find more than a human could, but I still have this feeling "maybe there is still one out there that I can get by using that dial" ....





didn't stop me from buying a hyper-techy new monitor-tv-hybrid though.
_________________

[Isfet]

this is maybe an extremely stupid question

but if all television stations are leaving the airwaves and going digital, could people flood analog receptions with pirate TV crap?


i want more Max Headrooms :(

[secret character]

Technically someone probably could, at least until they start using those frequencies for cellphones.
_________________
☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹
☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☺
☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹☹

[Chuplayer]

It looks like most channels in the area are down already. At work some of the guys watch TV during lunch, and right at 12:00PM, they lost the signal and ate in silence. Here at home, it looks like My 9 and NBC 4 are the only ones still up. My 9 has a ticker on the bottom of the screen saying they're going down at 11:59PM.

I hope they play the national anthem before they go off the air. It would be a nice throwback to the old days when TV stations actually went off the air at night.

[Chuplayer]

It looks like the final TV show I'm going to see is Law and Order: Criminal Intent. I don't like that show. I like the detective stuff in the beginning, but it gets boring when it becomes court stuff.

[The Drunken Samurai]

observation:the first line of neuromancer wil go over the next generation's heads

[Chuplayer]

[Chuplayer]

And that is how the world ends. With a man yelling "FILTHY JEWS!" on Law and Order, a Dorney Park commercial, and a Yankees commercial that was cut short.

Welcome to the human race.

[Leau]

I was talking with my mom about this the other day. She said, "Isn't it nice that they want to broadcast in clearer picture for everyone?"

"Oh no no no," I said. "Someone's making money off of this. Maybe the guys who make the converters. Maybe cable comapnies. But this isn't because of some kind of altruism. Someone is making a buck here."

"Hurmmmph," she said.


I just imagine all these fundamentalist nuts living in shacks in the middle of nowhere, with the rabbit-ear antennas with tin foil one them. And last night at around twelve all of them shouting "What the fuck!?" at once.
_________________

[Laurel Soup]

[spinach]

[spinach]

[CubaLibre]

[spinach]

law & order vilifies its defense attorneys a little too often for my tastes toph

[CubaLibre]

He got off on a technicality.
_________________
Let's Play, starring me.

[BenoitRen]

[spinach]

oh that's just not true

i got a seven year old box still going strong

[Chuplayer]

[spinach]

if it gets more than 99 channels it is a digital tuner

my 2002-ish 13" konka [who?] lacks an analog tuner

[BenoitRen]

[spinach]

i know of plenty television sets which have lasted awhile and your claim is baseless -- back it up with something and i'll give you something that isn't anecdotal

and do keep in mind it isn't enough to show me a bunch of consumer complaints about dead sets -- happens all the time, always has -- no, find me a comparison between sales and returned defective sets

so that's 1, 2 and 4

my set shows no sign of going out any time soon, but i have had a tube in an older set go from 100% to dead within a single dbz monologue so who knows what tomorrow brings!

[Zebadayus]

I have an eleven year old television that still serves me incredibly well.

[stotelheim]

I have never, ever ran into a TV that's lasted 5 years or less.
_________________
go away extralife

[BenoitRen]

Maybe not 5 years, but it's a fact that CRT TVs manufactured after 1995 don't last as long as the ones before. A friend of mine has a CRT TV from the 80s (that he uses for gaming, if I may add) that still works great to this day.

But you can bet that your LCD and plasma TVs won't last longer than five years.

• Assuming normal use of 4 hours a day, the plasma TV's gas will have been used up after 3-4 years, showing the first discolourations.
  
• Often, when you buy an LCD TV, it'll already have one or two dead pixels, which are barely noticeable. In either case, the first dead pixels will appear after two years. After 5 years you'll have about 100 dead pixels, and the electronics will cease functioning.
  

The TV manufacturers are finding new ways to keep selling TVs to us.
_________________
Get Xenoblade Chronicles!

[wasted potential]

Ben maybe you just have shitty luck buying TVs.
_________________

[spinach]

you know, i've got an lcd monitor i've been lugging around the last four years, no dead pixels [i always notice these things]

and there are crts manufactured after '95, you know. that 13" set i mentioned before is a tube

not to mention all of what you just posted has nothing backing it up -- where'd you get your numbers?

[Gironika]

two Sony-built SGI-branded (SGI of Donkey Kong-fame, yes) 20" CRTs from March 1996 and April 1997 (and an undated third one that I won't list due to no date-tag) plus a February 2002 Eizo 20" CRT want to have a word with you (Heck, I even can run a 1080p-signal on the SGIs, not sure about the Eizo that my brother was using up till he bought a 24" LCD one).


If it wasn't for a 23" LCD 1080p-monitor I'm using now, I still would rock my SGI-CRT like I used to up till two months ago. I should add that I got these after them being thrown away at several workplaces that wanted to get rid of them, the Eizos from my fathers company, the SGIs from a architect-bureau, so they already had quite some mileage before I got my hands on these.
And I frankly can't believe that those companies would go to the length of sending them in for repair just to give them away for free.


Cheap ones might break, mind you, but proper ones will work till the end of time until you'll switch to a newer model just because newer PCs or consoles support it.
_________________

[BenoitRen]

LCD: It all depends on how often you use it, but what I said is true. If you think it's bollocks, why don't you go research LCD technology and prove that what I say is wrong.

CRT: Say what you want, but it's a fact that CRTs aren't what they used to be. They used to last for 10 to 20 years! My grandparents' worked for 20 years, and like I said my friend's 80s TV still works great.
_________________
Get Xenoblade Chronicles!

[spinach]

dude you're not backing anything up with anything, you just brought in this baseless bullshit that doesn't come near to matching my own personal experience

i've read up on lcd tech, and plasma, and cathode ray tubes and vacuum tubes and front projection and rear projection and oled and other imaging tech whenever i've stumbled across something to read but i have not ever found anything that matches your claims

my monitor has been in regular use as my daily monitor since i got it and it has not so much as a single dead pixel -- in fact, on all the lcd monitors i've handled [my own and those belonging to others], i've seen a single dead pixel, on a laptop monitor which also has clear physical damage on the same row

i know defects happen, it's a fact of mass production, but those defects are exceptions rather than rules by the time any product goes into mass production [of course, that rule can have exceptions, too], or else the resulting fallout could kill any manufacturing outfit. SO! i'm writing off everything you say to the contrary until you can back it up for me with something concrete.

this has been one hell of a derailment and i'm pretty much done with it.

[Panoptic]

Dead pixels are typically caused by bad transistors in the processor controlling the liquid crystal array, not the screen itself, so I can't see why they'd develop dead pixels over time unless the IC is overheating (or the transistors are just... breaking, I guess). In fact, none of the LCD's I've personally owned have had, or developed dead pixels. My current desktop LCD is four years old and I've got a handful of LCD's considerably older than that. I run my brightness at about 30%, and the lamp is still just as, if not brighter than any new LCD I set next to it as well. Plus, LED-backlit displays will pretty much get rid of the lamp issues.

On plasmas... I've only owned a plasma for half a year, so I can't make any personal judgements, but everything I've read seems to show that gas leakage is pretty much non-issue, and current technology has the half-life rating at 30,000 and even 60,000 hours. In fact, I've read recently that Panasonic plasmas are the most reliable TV's you can currently buy (more so than DLP/LCoS/whatever).

[BenoitRen]

The quality control varies greatly from manufacturer to manufacturer.

Modern LCD displays have millions of liquid crystals. The chance for 1 of them to break before even having unpacked the LCD display is big. Over the years many more break. In the beginning you can't see it, but when 25 of them that are near each other are broken you see a spot.

And then you have lazy pixels and dead pixels.

As for plasma TVs: Not gas leakage. Gas that has burned up.

You may have experiences of your own, but my friends also have their experiences, which back up my argument.
_________________
Get Xenoblade Chronicles!

[Panoptic]

I build computers both at work and as a hobby and maybe one in fifty monitors I get has a dead or stuck pixel. QC may vary between manufacturers, but I don't think any major manufacturers have many issues delivering a defect-free screen nowadays. Plus, when it comes to displaying a computer desktop, I always run 1:1, so spotting a single dead pixel is no harder than a group of them when going through calibration. As far as the controller ICs dying over time, I can't imagine that could be attributed to anything other than poor design or thermal management.

...and I meant burnt gas and/or other defects when I mentioned the half-life figures. Current plasmas are rated to lose half of their brightness after 60,000 hours. If you're not putting static images on the screen or running it eye-searingly bright, a well-built unit should have no problems lasting a decade.

[Gironika]

[CubaLibre]

Benren in evidentiary terminology you have been thoroughly trounced.
_________________
Let's Play, starring me.

[BenoitRen]