I've finally come of age - that is the HDTV age. Last Friday, I had my HDTV tuner installed from my local cable company here in Los Angeles and I finally witnessed first hand what all the hoopla was all about. Now that I've seen a sampling of what HDTV can do - I must say that I can not go back to regular television easily.

My local cable company here in Los Angeles is Adelphia and they've been a bit slow in rolling out HDTV services. Time Warner Cable back in New York City had HDTV service for well over a year so I was rather disappointed that Adelphia did not have any when I first moved out here last year. However, all this changed when I called Adelphia in the beginning of February. After a few weeks of waiting for the cable guy - the day finally came when my old Digital Cable Tuner was to be swapped with the new Motorola HDTV tuner.

The actual switchover took only a few minutes of course. It was a matter of switching cable boxes and making sure the signal on the cable line was strong enough. Everything seemed just fine, so I quickly connected the appropriate component cables and then switched to channel 902 (which is CBS here).

WOW!

The difference in picture quality was immediate. Images that used to be grainy or fuzzy on my old DTV tuner all of sudden came to life. I flipped through the various HD channels and many shows that did transmit in HD just looked amazing. My Sony Television can support 1080i and thus the picture quality was just simply awesome - better than DVD resolutions of course.

During my cable installation, I did not have a pair of optical audio cables to connect to my receiver so I was listening to basic stereo audio that day. HDTV transmissions can carry Dolby Digital 5.1 audio transmissions so if you can decode the audio - then you should do so. A trip to Circuit City later on that week remedied my situation - I was able to listen to Dolby Digital audio on some channels - usually on HBO and Showtime. I watched Oceans Eleven in wide screen format (16:9) on HBO HD and the audio was coming down the wire at full 5.1 surround sound. Again.

WOW!

Now comes the bad parts. There really isn't that much HD content available on television as of yet. Depending on where you live, you're going to get a limited set of stations which will actually transmit in HD. Here in Los Angeles , I can only get 6 stations through Adelphia - which is pathetic. I can't even get ESPN HD or Discovery HD as of yet. Now even if you had HD stations, your show may not be in HD format. In fact, there's a high probability that your show will not be in HD format unless it's very new and it's broadcast during prime time hours. Despite all these issues, HDTV is here to stay and I must say that I can not go back to regular television ever again. The season premiere of the Sopranos this past Sunday was simply superb in HD format. I hope you can join me in enjoying the future of TV - HDTV.

In the next few months, we'll begin exploring the HDTV format and what you need to know before you jump into the new format. Feel free to post in our forums!

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