Getting digital cable TV in your home can make a huge difference when it comes to making the most of the time that you spend relaxing with family and friends while enjoying your favorite sports, movies, and TV shows and Comcast is the company that does the best job of delivering everything that you need in order to take advantage of this great way of getting your TV! Comcast’s cable TV service begins with the transmission of all of its programming in the digital TV format. This translates into a number of great advantages when it comes time to watch TV! The first thing you’ll notice if you’re used to analog TV when you tune into a digital TV transmission is how incredibly clear the picture is! Thanks to the resistance to interference that’s built into digital technology the picture will be just as good as the original copy, and that’s a big improvement over the fuzziness that crops up in any analog transmission that travels more than a dozen feet. When combined with the fact that the video cables are buried underground to avoid atmospheric interference, digital cable TV provides the ultimate combination of reliability and quality of picture and sound! You’ll also notice that digital TV from Comcast comes with an on screen program guide that not only provides you with information about each and every program that’s available through the service, but also lets you scroll through in order to concentrate on the channels that air the programs that you want to watch! In this way, you’ll have an interactive means of keeping track of all of the programs and to decide which ones you’ll want to watch. It’s a lot better than channel surfing in so many different ways! The other thing you’ll notice about Comcast’s digital cable TV service is the huge number of channels that are available through it. With the exception of the more economical packages, the programming packages that are available through this service far exceed the size of what cable TV could provide only a decade ago! This largely due to the use of the digital TV format. Not only does digital TV allow more channels to be transmitted over the a cable, but digital video can also be compressed using special software which extends the capacity of a cable to transmit channels even more! Combine that with even newer technology and Comcast has the potential to deliver as many channels as you could possibly need. One exciting type of technology that Comcast does a great job of providing for its subscribers is called HDTV. HDTV is short for high definition television and it has all of the attributes needed to convert your living room into a theater! This comes about as a result of a lot more pixels in the picture, a high fidelity native sound format, and a wide screen aspect ratio. You need to get an HDTV set in order to enjoy this great new technology, but Comcast can provide you with a huge number of high def channels to watch on it! Comcast’s DVR digital receivers add a whole new element to watching TV by providing you with an easy way to record specific TV programs when you aren’t available to watch them live! This allows you to manage your TV viewing time much more effectively so as not to miss out on the other activities in your life! Thanks to Comcast, watching TV never has to be dull again!
Posts Tagged ‘Tv Viewing’
Liven Up TV Viewing With Comcast
December 21st, 2009Understanding HDTV Resolution And What It Means For You
December 16th, 2009HDTV is a vastly improved method of broadcasting television shows and watching entertainment media. It is a byproduct of the digital age in electronics. By converting the picture and sound in digital format, great improvements have been made in the quality of the viewing experience in recent years. We are now able to watch digitally produced movies and programs by DVD and enjoy a much richer picture quality and sound that can even begin to rival movie theaters, however on a much smaller scale.
There are actually several improvements to TV viewing that have been made available in the HDTV standard and perhaps the most obvious is the display itself. Older televisions could only display a TV picture that consisted of 525 lines on the screen. Each line had about 500 pixels of information to show, so that basically adds up to 525 X 500 resolution. Just think on the fact that the most basic of computer displays operate at 640 X 480 resolution and you can begin to see why such an antiquated technology for television viewing needed to be changed.
But there have been even more improvements to the resolution factor in HDTV. Consider that standard televisions may have had 525 lines of information to display on the screen but they usually displayed that information on every other line at a time. Every 1/60 of a second it would display first all of the even numbered lines on the screen, and then change to display the odd numbered lines. And this happens over and over again. Because it happens so fast, your brain makes the adjustment for the alternating information and assembles the picture as one piece. This process is called interlacing in standard TV.
In HDTV the number of lines displayed on the screen is greatly enhanced, up to 1080 instead of 525, and the number of pixels on the sreen is up to 10X the number of those found in standard television. In addition, there are many HDTV monitors that can display every line on the screen every 1/60 of a second without interlacing them at all, and this is called “progressive scan”. So adding it up, you can have up to 10 times the resolution being displayed in a much smoother viewing format. It’s very easy then, to see why so many people are favorably impressed when they see the real capabilities of a broadcast or show being displayed on a high quality HDTV television set. As broadcasting in HDTV format becomes widely adopted in the near future, you will truly wonder how you ever watched television without it.
By: Jim Johnson
Big Screen Buying Advice
September 30th, 2009Consider This When Thinking About Buying Big:
1. Choose the Right Screen Size for your Room
Your seating distance will determine your sense of picture clarity and detail as well as the quality of the viewing experience. If all you watch are true HDTV images, then you can sit as close as twice the diagonal screen size– about 8 feet away for a 46-inch or a bit more for a 50-inch diagonal screen. But sitting that close may not be practical, because until the final conversion to all-HDTV broadcasting is completed (that’s at least 5 years away) a lot of your TV viewing may well be conventional analog TV, and those images may look fairly crummy up close. (Remember early big screen TVs?) If you watch regular non-HD TV sitting too close to a big screen, you’ll see all the flaws.
2. Flat Panel or Box
Those futuristic and very cool plasma and LCD flat panels that are only a few inches thick are appealing, but budget, screen size, and your need for optimal HDTV clarity are big factors you must consider. To get full HDTV resolution on a plasma panel means getting a 50-inch diagonal screen, and that’s expensive (about $3,000 USD and up). If you are willing to abandon the flat panel and accept a more conventional box (one that’s no more than 14 inches deep), you can get full HDTV resolution for a fraction of that amount. A 50-inch diagonal DLP rear-projection set that’s only 14 inches deep and weighs about 75 pounds would be $3,200. Also, you will still get a bright, stunningly good HD picture, minus the ultra-cool flat-panel appeal, of course. If you still like the flat panel and are willing to accept good but not true HD picture quality, you can save a lot of money on a smaller LCD or plasma display.
3. Do You Really Need HDTV Resolution?
Let’s say you won’t give up on the thin flat panel display, that you simply must have it. If you are satisfied with DVD clarity– it’s called Standard Definition (480 lines). There is also Enhanced Definition (EDTV) with 480-line progressive scanning (480p). The picture won’t be HDTV, because the plasma screen will convert incoming HD signals to its own resolution,? but DVD’s will look great, and any programs shot in HD will look a lot better than on your old analog set. And you’ll have your flat panel!
4. Wide-Screen 16:9 vs. Standard 4:3
Though the widescreen 16:9 aspect ratio (the ratio of the screen’s width to its height) is the HDTV standard, and matches most movies on DVD and HDTV programs, there are many TV series and news shows shot in the conventional, squarish TV shape of 4:3. Give some thought to the ratio of material you watch, and whether you’d prefer a digital HD 4:3 set that will display conventional TV programs full-screen, and wide-screen HD programs with black bars at the top and bottom. Remember that if you choose a wide-screen HD set, regular TV 4:3 programs will have large black bars to each side, unless you use the set’s stretch mode, which will extend the edges of the image to fill the wide screen, at the expense of sometimes considerable image distortion. Some 4:3 sets also have raster compression,? a vertical compression mode that maintains HD 1080i or 720p scanning lines so you get true HD clarity. You should look for that feature in a 4:3 HD set.
5. Big-Screen Choices: Know the Virtues and Flaws
If you are set on a big HD screen and you don’t want the hassle of a front projector that requires a totally darkened room, then a rear-projection TV (RPTV) is a logical and in some instances, a more economical choice. Most RPTV sets will get you true HD picture resolution, and will cost much less than a 50-inch plasma flat panel. The least expensive are the big and bulky CRT rear-projection sets, available in a wide choice of screen sizes, from 40 to 80 inches diagonal, almost all in HD versions with 16:9 widescreen displays. Like direct-view HD CRT sets, rear-projection CRTs are very heavy and have considerable depth. The image looks its best in a dimly lit room, and at increasing angles, the screen typically becomes dim or darkish. Uniform brightness over a wide viewing angle is not a virtue of CRT rear-pro sets. Lifespan on average is about 7 to 10 years.
By: Cody Smith
