abeles@mhuxm.UUCP (abeles) (12/24/84)
Shopping for a new color TV I found the following out. I would like to
read others' comments on the purchase of a new TV.
I shopped in NJ at Crazy Eddie's, Sterns, Arthurs, A&S, Video Concepts.
I understand that Trader Horn's also has very good prices but have not
checked it out, nor have I checked out the discount houses in NY.
The new thing (to me) in color TV's is called "flat-screen." This
appears to mean that there is a flat sheet of glass in front of
the CRT. Accompanying this there are improvements in the clarity of
the picture which may or may not be related to the way the TV is
illuminated ambiently in the room. A related feature (adding to the
pleasing quality of the picture) is the sharper corners of the screen
particularly found in Toshiba Products such as the C2010M, a 20"
model which CE wants $600 for (slightly negotiable). JVC models also
have this feature.
Basically, the 19" color TV seems to be quite reduced in price; Arthur's
will sell a GE model for $260.
But there are certain features which command higher price:
--remote control
--electronic tuning
--remote control unit which when inserted into TV becomes standard control
--square corners
--better sound
--cable ready (this is quite confusing to me)
--sleep timer
--appearance of greater color saturation in the picture (JVC)
--ability to function as RGB monitor
--ability to display 80 columns of text for use as a terminal
--ability to control a sound system (JVC) or at least feed the TV sound
through your stereo if you want to
From the places I visited, the first three have vastly better prices
(Crazy Eddie's, Arthurs, and Sterns; Sterns is a department store).
Toshiba and JVC have the most modern and stylish units which can
be quite expensive ($800 for a 20" Toshiba RGB monitor, etc., model
number 2084). Generally, price for color TV's is directly related to
the screen size, so that when you approach $1000 you get something
like a 25" screen, which is really big; above that are the projection
units. But we see that the JVC and Toshiba models in particular are
capable of being quite expensive without having bigger screens than
the GE model mentioned above.
A (major?) difference between the GE model and the higher priced
models mentioned is a styling difference. As viewed, the GE unit
is much larger looking at the front than these particular JVC and
Toshiba models. That is, a much greater proportion of the unit
is taken up visually by the CRT. I suspect, but do not know, that
the GE may be heavier, as well. I find the appearance of the
more expensive models to be an advantage.
The difference in price also includes remote control, which is more
of an objective improvement. The Toshiba also has something they call
"MSSS" sound. What is this? I don't know. It does sound better,
though.
If you prefer a smaller unit, the Sony KV1357R seems pretty good (and
someone I know has one). The Arthur's price was $400, but I hear
it can be gotten for maybe $50 less. It is a 13" model with remote
control and is cable ready.
But, WHAT DOES CABLE READY really mean? If I were to subscribe to
cable TV, would I pay less each month if my TV were "cable-ready?"
Or does the cable company just charge the same amount for installing
and renting their unit whether or not it has to convert to channel
3? And what is all this talk about the number of cable channels?
This is really confusing! Panasonic advertises 94 channels. JVC
for its C-2065 model ($479 at Sterns) advertises 142 channels. And
I believe I have seen one which features something over 150 channels.
Where does it stop? When is it enough? I surely don't know, but
maybe some enlightened expert reader of the newsgroup could elaborate
on this subject.
When I think about it, at $260 the GE unit (and there are many like
it in that range--this is the least expensive of the 19-20" models
that I found, but Hitachi and others have these models) is about
half the price of the better Toshiba and JVC units. I could get
a VCR and a TV for about $600 instead of just a better quality TV
for $500. It wouldn't be cable ready, however, and I just realized
that it also uses the antiquated (and now banned by the FCC) old
fashioned rotary switch tuners which separate VHF and UHF channels.
As an aside, all the cheaper units no matter what price range (i.e.,
last year's models?) seem to have plastic wood-grain exterior.
The exception is Sony which seems to have been more sensitive to
the distasteful falseness of plastic wood in its 15" and smaller
models. Even Toshiba has (CX-2034) a wood-grain model with the
flat screen at $499 (Stern's). Did I mention above (I don't think
so) that only Toshiba and the most expensive JVC models have the
square cornered CRT? This model does too, I think.
What say you? Are there other quality manufactures besides JVC and
Toshiba? What about sound (it's hard to judge in a noisy TV
display area with 15 units operating at once, so comments from
those who have units with what they consider to be good sound are
especially welcome)? And do readers think that the new models
are just deceptively different in style, not function and therefore
not worth the price?
--J. Abeles, consumermark@cbosgd.UUCP (Mark Horton) (12/27/84)
In article <293@mhuxm.UUCP> abeles@mhuxm.UUCP (abeles) writes: >But, WHAT DOES CABLE READY really mean? If I were to subscribe to >cable TV, would I pay less each month if my TV were "cable-ready?" >Or does the cable company just charge the same amount for installing >and renting their unit whether or not it has to convert to channel >3? And what is all this talk about the number of cable channels? I have only a partial understanding of this, if someone really has a complete list of the cable channels, please correct me. There are 3 primary bands of TV channels: VHF (e.g. channels 2-13), UHF (14-72), and cable. (This is an over simplification, I think there are really 4 or 5 different cable bands, and any given cable company uses some random combination of them.) The convention I've seen numbers the cable channels 14 and up, but these are different from UHF. "cable ready" means that your TV can directly receive the cable channels without a converter box. (When you subscribe to cable TV, they install a converter box on your TV which is basically a switch on which you select a channel from the cable input, and it outputs that channel on channel 2 or 3 to your TV.) Some TV sets and VCR's have a coax connector on the back that you can plug your TV directly into - this is called a 75 ohm connector (as opposed to the traditional 300 ohm two-screw connector.) A TV set with a 75 ohm input IS NOT NECESSARILY CABLE READY, although some salesmen will claim it is! All this jack does for you is avoid the need to buy a 29 cent 75-to-300 adapter, and make a small improvement in your picture quality from not having to go through a 300 ohm bottleneck. Most people do not have cable ready TV's, and use the switch box. If your TV has a remote control but is not cable ready, you may have to forego the use of your remote control and use the switch box instead. (Some hybrid boxes put the first 12 channels on VHF, so you can use your remote for channels 2-13 but must use the switch box for the more obscure channels.) If your TV is cable ready, you can use your own remote without messing with their box. (Unless the channel you are watching is scrambled, in which case you can't avoid using yet another descrambler box.) If you have a cable-ready TV, will your cable company charge you less? Probably not. In fact, they may charge you MORE! The reason is that, if you use their box, you can be restricted by what the box can get. If your company offers some channels for extra charge, but does not scramble these channels, and your cable company knows you have a cable ready TV, they may charge you for the extra channels because they know you can get them if you want them. (Our company will, if you insist, charge you the lower rate, and send someone out to install a filter on your line to take out the channels you claim you don't watch.) The prices of TV's and VCR's really jumps if you want remote control and/or cable ready, doesn't it? The cheapos can be found for $200-$300 (for example, in Columbus, today's paper's SUN-TV ad quotes $159 for a 13" Spectricon, $224 for a 19" RCA, $218 for a 19" Spectricon, $349 for a 25" GE Console, and $224 for a Sanyo VCR) but if you want these features, you could easily pay $500 and up. It isn't widely known, but there are two devices you can buy, on the open market, that will turn your TV into a cable-ready TV, possibly with remote control. The first is a "block converter". It takes the cable channels, as a block, and converts them into the UHF frequencies. Chances are your TV and VCR can pick up UHF with no help. A typical block convert costs $30-$40. The second is a remote control cable switch. It acts just like the one the cable company rents you, but has a remote control built in. I bought one in Canada (a Jerrold 770) for about $140 (that's a little over $100 in US money) and it works fine on my Ohio cable TV (the channels are numbered the same.) I recently saw a similar box at the local Mr. How Warehouse (that's a hardware store owned by Service Merchandise) for $77. Some cautions are in order. If you buy one of these boxes, make sure you can take it back if it doesn't work. Cable companies aren't really very standardized yet, and lots of things can go wrong. You may get a box that numbers channels differently than your cable, or that gets a different subset of the universe of channels. You may not be able to use your descrambler boxes with it. (We made the mistake of getting the Jerrold box that outputs on channel 3 [we had the choice of 2 or 3] and our descramblers take input from channel 2 and output to 2, so the descrambler didn't work. We didn't really want the Movie Channel anyway.) If your cable company uses over-the-air, two-way, or addressable technology, there is even less standardization in this area, plus you have to have registered address with your cable company, so these may not work. If your TV already has a remote control, and you get one of these remote control boxes, the two remotes may confuse each other and overlap in function, resulting in an unusable combination. Finally, your cable company may not appreciate you hooking up such a box (and they may not understand what it means) and may decide you aren't allowed to do so. (I suppose local laws may apply, too.) I treat my switch+TV as a cable ready TV, for purposes of telling them what I have, and they seem happy. Mark
shaprkg@sdcrdcf.UUCP (Bob Shapiro) (12/29/84)
I have cable with Valley Cable in LA. They use a system which permits them to scramble all pay channels and they can send a signal from headquarters to my decoder/switch box which will descramble any channel they wish (usually the ones I pay for but occasionally a promotion or even an error). Since I do not have a cable-ready TV but do have a VCR with capability up to channel 55 I bought a box for $50 which does the following: |-----------------------------------<| Antenna VCR | | Cable from street | | | | | | | | | | Splitter | V V V /\ /\ |--------------|----<---- --------->------>|---------------| | BOX |>------TV | Decoder | | |>------VCR ----------------- | | | | ---------------- Now I can input to my TV from the cable when I am not watching scrambled channels or channels higher than 55 by switching them through my VCR and I even have a remote control capability. If I want to watch pay TV I set the decoder as input and watch it on channel 3 either with or without my VCR. (I can record it with the VCR and watch if I want or record and not watch). If the cable goes out then I merely switch the box to antenna in and I am exactly where I was 10 years ago and switch the channels on my TV to get what I want. If I had a cable-ready TV I would not have to send the signal through the VCR in order to bypass the box. A friend of mine has cable through a company that is a little older and they control what you see via filters on the telephone pole. While this is not nearly as good as mine when you want to call up the company and change your pay channels or latch onto a special like a fight or new movie it does provide the capability to switch the pay channels without needing a decoder box. As a matter of fact all his decoder box does is convert the cable signal from the allocated cable 6mz channel to channel 3 of his TV - it does absolutely no unscrambling. In his case the company charges for the box and if you have a cable-ready TV you are not required to get it saving yourself money. In my case the company requires that you have a decoder and even though you have a cable-ready TV and don't need it you still must pay for it. Part of the reason is that my company will eventually get involved in 2-way communication on the cable offering services like security, question-answering, home selection of special offerings, etc. Their decoder has several buttons which presently are inactive and this is how they plan to control these services. The original question of should you have a cable-ready TV is now ready to answer. If you have a modern cable system like I do and pay for a lot of scrambled channels you may be wasting your money. If you have a cable-ready VCR you can convert your TV to cable-ready for about $50. The real payoff is if you have an old cable system based on filters rather than scrambling like my friend. Then you get full use of your cable-ready TV. Also beware of the number of channels which you get with your cable-ready. I have seen numbers as low as 105 and as high as the 130's. These numbers mean the following: 84 of them are allocated for VHF and UHF. Cable TV does not handle UHF. It either puts key UHF stations on unused VHF channels or on cable channels. Thus there are only 21 cable channels available on a 105 channel system. This only takes you to cable channel 35. In my cable system the company goes well into the 60's so I would not be able to see all of the channels with a 105-channel set. I think my VCR goes through channel 125 which is the reason I can't see the high channels on my system. The reason behind the increase in channel capacity has to do with the improvement in the technology. It used to be very difficult to deal at high band widths but the equipment has improved to the point that it is relatively common now so the newer cable companies now provide more channels than the older ones.
doug@terak.UUCP (Doug Pardee) (01/07/85)
> But, WHAT DOES CABLE READY really mean? If I were to subscribe to > cable TV, would I pay less each month if my TV were "cable-ready?" The technical details have already been described by others. The bottom line is this: Cable ready TV's and VCR's should have been a good idea, but they aren't. The chances are very good that you will NOT be able to tune ALL of your cable channels now. As a result, you'll HAVE to use the cable company's converter box. As a result of THAT, you only need to be able to tune one channel (2, 3, or 4 as appropriate). Even if you can tune all cable channels now, it is almost certain that you won't be able to in the near future (within the lifetime of the set). The advent of "stereo TV" threatens to make things even worse, since the stereo TV standard is fundamentally incompatible with the usual "scrambling" that cable companies use. There is a crying need for an ability to connect TV's, VCR's, stereo systems, and cable TV together in a reasonable manner. I wouldn't be surprised to find a revolt occurring in the next few years, with a new set of standards which is to a great extent incompatible with current equipment but which allows video equipment to be combined into a cohesive system. Or, maybe, simply the demise of cable TV! Doug Pardee -- Terak Corp. -- !{hao,ihnp4,decvax}!noao!terak!doug