Digital Switchover Madness?
My local paper has just run an article about "Digital Madness" with the storyline that people are confused about the Digital Swithover. They claim that people are needlessly throwing away analogue TVs that could be converted to digital using a receiver costing as little as £20. The story is accompanied by shots of loads of old TVs at a recycling plant.
It's true, they could be converted, but the paper has it wrong. The truth is that people are dumping their old CRT TVs in order to buy better flatscreen ones. The digital switchover is still a few years away in our area. The paper knows this but prefers the more shocking line about wastage and confusion due to the switchover.
If you were looking for a good TV a few years ago a reasonable choice might have been a "large" 32 inch CRT TV. It might have set you back £800 and it would have been bulky in size and weight. You probably would have needed a large sturdy table in the corner of your room to put it on and a professional strongman to carry it in. Hopefully you held back and made do with a smaller one, knowing that something better was on the way.
Today's 32 inch flat screen LCD TVs start at around £350 - £400 and can easily be hung on the wall or placed on a small table leaving enough room for other gadgets and the TV Times. These sets may be towards the low end of the current TV market but they are still high definition screens with a picture quality that would have cost several times as much just two years ago. I am not talking about cheap brands either. Toshiba, Sony, Samsung, LG and Panasonic all have great TVs in that price range. And of course even bigger screens are also available at affordable prices with 40 and 46 inch screens being popular in the UK. By the way, they used to have a trick for measuring the old CRT screens that meant a 32 inch screen was really only about 30 inches across the diagonal of the picture, but when a flat screen TV says it is 32 inches you will find that the picture is actually that big.
Most of the new TVs now come with a Freeview tuner built in so for most people the switch to digital is not much of an issue. With these sleek flatscreen TVs available at such reasonable prices why would anyone wait until the analogue signal is about to be switched off before getting one. The best place for those old CRTs with their gently curving screens is indeed the recycling yard.
If you want to move a little further into the twenty-first century and join the high definition generation then HD receivers for Freesat and Blu-ray players are now available at prices descending faster than Austin Powers' pants. Is that confusing? Not really.