HDTV Home Theater

Getting HDTV Into Your Home Theater
By Andrew Seltz

Feeding your HDTV video system an actual HDTV signal makes a world of difference. I recently worked on the installation of a very high-end home theater system (six figure price tag on this job) and when the time came to test it, it was hard to watch anything but a true HDTV channel on the big 20 foot projection screen.

A high definition television system has a native resolution and every signal is either scaled up or scaled down until it matches this native resolution. The optimum situation is to feed it a signal that matches the native resolution so no scaling is required.

When a standard definition tv signal is displayed on an HDTV, the result is like looking at a low quality JPEG photo. All of the artifacts in the image are magnified. When you switch to a true HDTV image it's like someone cleaned a layer of dirt off of the tv. Everything becomes much clearer and more vivid. So, how do you get a true HDTV signal into your new home theater system?

Tuning in to HDTV Channels

The three primary ways of getting an HDTV signal into your home theater system are: over-the-air, cable, and satellite broadcasts. Let's take a closer look at these options.

Getting HDTV Over-The-Air

It might come as a surprise, but over 99% of US homes have at least one television station with a digital broadcast and 85% of all US homes have 5 or more stations broadcasting digitally. These are the major networks that you watch every day. Many of them have HDTV broadcasts. Before you go any further, look for local HDTV signals available in your area (www.hdtvpub.com.)