Digital Television: is it really that good?
Unless you've been under a rock for the last few months you will be aware that the country is slowly switching from analog to digital television. I'm not going to get technical because to be quite honest, I'm not a technical person. However digital television is supposed to offer you a far more varied array of programs than analog. The old analog days gave you four channels. Digital now makes it possible to have any number of channels and more can be added quite easily. Sorry, but about as far as my knowledge goes.
So we are waving goodbye to analog and welcoming in digital with all these television programmes at our disposal, brilliant isn't it? Unfortunately I wish I could agree with that statement. Now I'm going to try and refrain from getting angry now because if I do, I'm going to start ranting and raving and shouting obscenities. I'll get straight to the point, I ABSOLUTELY DETEST DIGITAL TELEVISION. It's absolutely rubbish. I'm not talking about the programs themselves, I'm talking about the signal and reliability of digital television. Digital television is just not stable. At the time of writing I am having to watch all my television programmes through sky because the main channels I watch are down, I've just got "no signal" on the screen. If you had a poor signal with analog then maybe your picture would not be quite so good, but you could still watch the television. If you have a poor signal with digital then it is totally unwatchable because the screen becomes pixelated and just freezes.This can't be right? I don't recall ever having problems like this on analog television. But then again it has been around for many many years. Digital television is in its infancy in its present form and it seems that those of us who live in areas where analog has now all but disappeared, we are testing it for everyone else who has yet to switch over. I'm sure that the powers be will deny that but if digital television was a brand-new car, I would have taken it back and got a refund months ago.
I truly hope that when the time comes for analog users to switch over to digital, there is a huge improvement from the service a lot of us down here in the South West are receiving at the moment
We've recently got a couple of proper digital TVs in our family and I find their slowness in switching channels really frustrating. It seems to take several seconds to even acknowledge that you've pressed a button and then another two or three seconds to actually change the channel. The same is true when you push the up/down channel button. That is the case with at least two of the three DTVs we have (the third is in my parents' room and I don't use it).
Yet, we've had digital set-top boxes for years and they've never given us that problem - you change the channel and it just changes. Why are DTVs not like that?
I'm living in London, and the signal is usually pretty good, although I've had some problems where the ITV and Channel 4 channels don't pick up for some reason.