I recently had this experience and I was sort of wondering if anyone else has experienced this.
The following story was not the first time either
Soooo TWO Coworkers purchased HDTV's
towards the end of last year.
They had spoken to me a little bit about it,
with me always praising HDTV and available content (I'm / we are lucky enough to get all majors + OTA)
Soo somehow just recently I got around to asking them
how they were enjoying the purchase...and both responded similarly...
- Well it's BIG.....
- Well, it doesn't blow me away, NOT like in the store...
- The super bowl looked a little better on my tube.....

Clearly they felt like they had been had and were too proud / embarrased to admit it...
Something was NOT jiving.....
the more I talked the more I came to beleive the NEITHER person was watching HDTV.....hmmmm
The clincher was how they described the "HD broadscast" of the superbowl.
So me being the HDTV soldier I am, I arranged / agreed to go to both peoples houses and see what is up.
End of the story is,
both people had great sets, had paid for premium digital / HD content....
and both had been "installed by the cable companies"...two different carriers....
BOTH were hooked up incorrectly with wiring that could NEVER carry HDTV?????
SO these two people had been badmouthing HDTV for like 6 months
because they THOUGHT they were watching HDTV because that is what the cable company told them.
Now granted, I would have expected (especially) these people to be a little better educated about their products...
but I also can see the point that some things many people do take for granted....
like the cable company hooking their own products up correctly.....and I'm not sure that that is unreasonable...
The scary part is that BOTH of these people are above average in intelligence and general technical gadget knowledge....
They TRIED to do all the right things within their abilities....
talk about setting back HDTV progress.....
anyway, I was just amazed and severely disappointed that the
cable companies are still so completely clueless on the premium content and hardware they are selling,
and these instances REALLY hurt the forward progress of HDTV....
just wondering how many people have experienced anything like this???
OH yeah.....I of course got them hooked up correctly and have been "thank you'd" like every other day for a month now....
NOW they are impressed.....
but the damage is already done for all the people they told that it basicaly sucked and was a waste of money!?!?!?

I couldn't agree more. It is sad to think i know several people who purchased a new HDTV on advice of ignorant salespeople and who themselves are clueless:

One was sold a complete system with standard DSS receiver! Another had a digital cable box but didn't know they had to pay extra for the HIDEF channels and was watching analog. Another satellite owner with a HiDef box didn't know he could get the local channels in HIDEF with an OTA, and to make matters worse, was paying extra to DTV for analog locals!

Unbelievable. We need more mainstream news stories to help educate the consumer. Retailers need to train their salespeople better.

The March issue of Consumer Reports does a good job of explaining HDTV to the layman, but certainly doesn't promote it: "HDTV's generally perform better ...... they're worth the higher cost if you want the best image quality." is about the most enthusiasm they could muster.

I've been trying to educate friends, they are all blown away by my "home theater" and want to purchase. I guess i will have to hold their hand when they go to the retailer.

Maddog,

Unforutnately the scenario you describe is quite common. Paying better wages for better talent is the key and that will probably not happen.

Happened to my co worker. He was unimpressed until he found out Comcast hooked up his HD receiver to his HDTV with a RF connection. The component cables were there the installer just didn't use them. Yet another reason to avoid cable if possible.

The expectations for retailers and cable installers are consistantly low. So, we should find this example to be no surprise. (in fact, I would be more surprised if they both did a creditible job for the consumers). Hopefully, this situation will change with time.

But now, the is another element that threatens to undermine the advancement that is HDTV. CBS, in an effort to upgrade their presentation of the Super Bowl, requested that advertisers submit HD versions of their commercials. Not surprisingly, they didn't get many.

After the negative feedback that the advertising agencies got from NOT supplying HD spots for the Super Bowl, they are now trying to comply with CBS's request for HD spots for the upcoming NCAA basketball tournament. Unfortunately, the agencies are taking an approach that would hurt, more than help, the HD movement.

They are looking for the easiest route to give CBS what it wants. That approach is to uprez and crop their current standard def commercials to supply 16x9, "HD" spots. Talk about taking a wrong turn!!!
All this will do is convince any doubters that creating HD commercials is NOT worth the effort because their solution will only show spots that look WORSE than their SD equivalents.

The education burden is falling heavily on the post production houses that will be creating these HD versions. The ad agencies, notorious for their budget watching, that any uprezed spot is NOT, NOT, NOT High Definition.

Creating true HD spots is a real opportunity to showcase products at their best. Taking shortcuts only will retard the HD movement.

The biggest thing I see with HDTV is clothing. For the first time you can really see a garment for what it is. I am not into clothes but I find myself looking at shows going hmmm, where can I find that outfit!

This is one of the highlights of the awards shows; Seeing the clothing in all it's full glory. Oscar...

>Yet another reason to avoid cable if possible.

It all depends. In late Dec, I had very well informed Comcast tech guy in my house to install HD STB. He had proper component cables and knew exactly what he was doing. Kevin

Cox cable in Roanoke, VA did a great job installing my HD STB. He even set-up my PIP and showed me how to change the receiver to receive DD 5.1. The Tech was 20 something and had an HD set for himself. One week later the same tech installed my father-in-law's STB on the other side of town. I appears that they have one tech that installs all the HD receivers here in Roanoke.

My cable techs have all been well trained. It really isn't fair to bash cable techs or sat techs as I am sure there is incompetence found in both arenas.

Mark

This story is so common you would not believe it. A couple ask me to help them with their HDTV as they couldn't see the difference. They bought one of the best Mits' from Tweeter and they came out and set it up. That was a year before they called me in. When I took a look behind the set the only thing going in was their DirecTV connection and it was not an HD box. Nobody told them they needed a special DirecTV box, dish, etc. etc. They did have an OTA in their attic which was not connected to the TV. When I connected it to the built in HD tuner and showed them real HD they could not believe they'd had the set for a year without seeing HD. So sad.

I did not mean to appear to be "bashing" the techs.....
it is 100% their employers fault.....
they can't force their employers to train them correctly.......
MY real point was how disgraceful it is that this be so common,
and the unfortunate ramifications it has on the HDTV movement.
I do not know of any other service industry where there is such a prevelance of complete lack of product delivery knowldege.....
the only thing that comes close was the firt few pitiful months when DSL and ISDN and cable modems came out....
a LOT of cluless techs were sent out on installs there too....
but I doubt it had as sever impact potential as this......
To have problems with a $100 modem pales incomparison to problems with a 2-3-4+ thousand dollar TV's / HD setups.

my buddy thought he was watching hd...but he had standard direct tv sat dish and receiver....all sales people are stupid....even the ones in a very reputable high audio video store that i have a lot of respect 4......they know music and audio equipment.but their HD looks like crap and all sets are pro calibrated with the highest cabling money can buy..and they love 720p!!!! and think 1080i is no good and on it's way out!!!!!!!!that's what happens when you use too much high end equipment.plasma ,lcd dlp etc,....crt is the best way to watch HD.especially OTA

>>I do not know of any other service industry where there is such a prevelance of complete lack of product delivery knowldege.....

Dish and DirecTV?

They do the same thing when they set the customer up on RF channel 3 or 4 for the worst picture and mono sound. You must use the A/V outputs for the best picture and stereo audio!

...when I got hooked up with my HD from TWCNYC, what a comedy of errors that was.

The installer insisted that I would be able to utilize my all important picture in picture feature- not only for SD but HD too. This really interested me since I knew that the set top boxes "decodes" the signal. How were they going to do that? Maybe they had a new set top box with dual tuners that I wasn’t familiar with.

As it turned out- they gave me two set top boxes. Both fed into two different inputs on the TV. HA!

The tech said, "Now you can use the p in p but… just be careful with the remotes."
Well duh! You hit the remote, it controled both boxes regardless of where they were or how you aimed it. What a joke.

I ended up keeping the one HD box and hooked it into one input and ran the aerial into another. Now I had my p in p, although limited but p in p none the less.

In their defense- this was three and a half years ago and in New York, HD was still brand new, in fact, I was on a waiting list for the HD box going back to mid 2000. Regardless, this situation wasn’t really an HD savvy issue. It was a basic installer situation.

That’s just one example, of my many insane encounters, with the local TWC tech-ies.

Thank God for you guys and this forum.

When I bought my Sony KV36XBR400 HDTV compatible TV over 3 years ago I couldn't wait to get HDTV (I had an ongoing hatred of NTSC for years, especially after seeing a demo of HDTV at a local department store several years earlier - the HD equipment had come in from Japan). My choice here in Canada was Star Choice or Bell ExpressVu. I went to Radio Shack (big mistake) who advised me that Star Choice was the way to go for HDTV (that proved to be very questionable ... I now have both systems because of the short comings of both).

To start with Radio Shack failed to tell me that I needed a separate HDTV decoder to go with the Star Choice receiver (with Bell it is built into their top of the line receiver). I bought the HDTV decoder from another dealer only to find out that Radio Shack had sold me the wrong receiver - it could not receive HDTV. Then when the installer came he discovered that the I had a defective LNB. I had to search around the city for a Radio Shack that could give me a new one. Then the installer discovered that I needed a larger dish for my area for HDTV.

I sent off a nasty letter to one of the Vice Presidents of Star Choice. To his credit he put a lady on my case that straighted out the entire matter. She had me send the entire Satellite dish and receiver to them at their cost and refunded the original installation fee. She then helped me get the correct equipment from one of their installers here in Vancouver. Then everything went smoothly.

I let the installer do all the hook-ups and tweeking with the dish, but I did all the inside hook-ups (between the receiver and HDTV decoder and Sony TV ... I wasn't going to let anyone screw that up).

The bottom line is that if I had not been so passionate about HDTV I am sure I would have been entirely put off by this experienced and said to hell with it!

HiDefBob