In my first article I wrote how there’s never been a better time to buy a high definition (HD) television, and I had just preordered the Samsung HLS-5087W 50 inch rear projection DLP unit. The Samsung was delivered last Thursday and here’s a summary of my initial reaction.
First let me give some background on preparing for the new HD television. I’m a satellite TV subscriber and needed to upgrade my DirecTV hardware to be HD-compatible. So last month I logged on to http://www.directv.com and ordered the HD upgrade package. For $200 DirecTV came out and replaced my old satellite dish with a new 5-LNB oval HD dish. The HD package included the lease of DirecTV’s new H20 HD receiver, and also included installing a new UHF antenna on my roof to receive other-the-air (OTA) HD local broadcasts. The new dish and receiver were required for HD reception since DirecTV is transmitting local HD broadcasts in the new MPEG-4 compression format instead of the older MPEG-2 standard. Since HD material requires much more bandwidth than standard definition video, satellite and cable providers will be migrating to the new MPEG-4 standard over time and DirecTV...