New Technology TV

For the ultimate home theater experience and the best HD component on the market today, look no further than Direct TV. Their fully equipped HD DVR offers all the latest capabilities so you can take charge of your TV!

Back in the olden days, the only type of television set you could get was a simple cathode ray tube. Now there are a huge variety of television technologies out there, all with their own individual benefits and pitfalls. While the cathode ray tube will probably be phased out over the next few years, LCD, Plasma, and Digital Light Processing televisions are all becoming increasingly popular.

The war between Sony's Blu-ray and its rival HD-DVD format made by Toshiba has been raging for quite some time now. Both formats were intended to be the dominant format of High Definition Digital Video Disc, but were introduced virtually simultaneously and have gotten in the way of each other attaining dominance in the market. This isn't too surprising given the memories of the VHS/Betamax video cassette format war back in the eighties. Like VHS and Betamax, the Blu-ray and HD-DVD formats aren't compatible with each other and only one is expected to survive the war. This has essentially frozen the market both for the discs and the players because no one wants to get stuck with a machine that only plays the losing format or discs that can't be played by any machines.

Direct TV has been in the digital satellite TV business for more than a decade and has come to be known as the most reliable TV service provider in the industry, offering hundreds of channels of great entertainment to viewers around the country. Direct TV now has 15 million subscribers. Delivering a wide range of channels, as well as the most advanced home theater equipment, Direct TV is the largest provider of satellite TV in operation today.

In yet another bid to merge the related but parallel worlds of televisions and computers Pinnacle Systems has released the PCTV HD Pro Stick. The unit runs about one hundred and thirty dollars and is supposed to be an easy way for people to watch television from a variety of sources over their computers. It comes in the form of a unit about the size of a cigarette lighter with a USB connection on one end and a male coaxial cable connection on the other, software to enable its use on your computer, and a detachable antenna to enable it to pick up over the air broadcasts.

In all of the hype surrounding high definition television, one type of technology that's frequently overlooked is the high definition upconverter. A high definition upconverter is able to convert standard definition programming into a picture quality that will be acceptable as high definition programming.

The war between Sony's Blu-ray high definition digital video disc it's rival, Toshiba's HD-DVD format is still raging with no end in sight. Both formats can record all of the data necessary for a full length movie in High Definition Television format, and were released almost simultaneously. Both take advantage of blue laser technology which can encode data on a disc more finely than the read lasers that are used for normal DVD's and CD's, enabling the disc to hold far more information than the older format despite being the same size. Although they use the same type of technology, subtle differences between the two keep them from being compatible so anyone who buys a player for one format won't be able to play the other format without buying the other player.

It seems that High Definition Television has hit another snag that will get in the way of it becoming mainstream. While High Definition Television technology has been popular in Japan for years, there have been a number of impediments to the high resolution, wide screened television format being widely adopted in the United States. These barriers have included high cost, lack of availability of supporting equipment, and an inability to educate consumers about the new technology.