HD everything

If I've begun one of these posts once with the words, "When I was at Electronic Media," referencing the two years and change I spent gettlng a small-screen education at the trade publication that has since rechristened (or, in this business, "rejewished") itself TV Week, I've done it a dozen times, giving me at most three more times before it becomes that much more tiresome ...

Anyway, what I mean to say is that what was the non-promise that was high-density television in 2001-02 is now coming into consumer-embraced bloom.

I previously thought a $500 cathode-ray-tube HD set would usher in the "revolution," but I didn't count on the suddenly affordable LCD screen as the medium for the message that pore-exposing digital is in -- and old, fuzzy analog "living color" is as dead as ... vinyl albums, cars without air-conditioning in California, and MSG in your moo goo gai pan.

The conditions on the ground -- at Best Buy, Circuit City and the like -- are that people want big-screen TVs. And they want them with plasma or LCD screens. And if they're spending THAT KIND of money, they'd better have HD included.

Also not hurting are the HD packages available from cable and satellite providers. Lost in all of this is the over-the-air HD signals from broadcast stations. Given a strong station and a proper rooftop antenna (remember those, Philistines? I even installed one once), I imagine free HD signals are their for the taking. I'd love to get ABC's digital-only news station, but then again, I'm so old-school I have neither cable nor a TV with vertical size bigger than 23 inches.

But I really and truly digress, because a few years hence, the CRT TV will probably be relegated to the dustbin of electronic history, with LCD flat screens the only way to project televised images -- and very likely HD compatible as a matter of course.

Now I don't have my ear to the ground, or in the air, as closely as I did in my trade-publication days, but I can see 10 years from now the end of analog television and cable broadcasting, with a cheap HD-converter box available for those who cling to their old analog NTSC TV sets, but the rest of us will be watching digital on screens large, small and eventually not at all, as the networks pipe video into special glasses, or directly into our ad-lovin' brains.