cygweb

The Harrisburg area's first Best Buy store opened a few weeks ago, less than a mile away from a Circuit City store that opened about a year and a half ago. I visited them the Friday they opened and was impressed by their selection, but not their prices. Being in the market for a new TV later this year, I looked at their 32" and 36" HDTVs. All the TVs I was looking at were running the same loop, and its original aspect ratio (OAR) was 16:9. On some of the 4:3 sets (what I was looking at) the picture was horizontally squashed. Playing with the menus, I found that the sets were getting their picture from a coax feed, not from the component video jacks that would be required for a site-distributed HDTV feed. The display source was anamorphic widescreen 480-line interlaced (480i) NTSC - DVD resolution. I was a little disappointed that the store decided not to pump HDTV feeds to these sets so that their picture quality (PQ) could be compared. The most popular HDTV resolution is 1080-line interlaced (1080i) - more than double the vertical resolution of DVD.
I went back to the store with my wife on Friday so that I could show her some of the sets and play with their remotes a bit. I asked one of the salesmen if there were plans to hook the HDTV-capable sets up to HD feeds, and he said that they didn't have any HD feeds in the store yet. That meant that all of the HDTVs in the store were running DVD-resolution programming: certainly nice looking, but hardly enough to convey the PQ necessary for someone to make an informed purchasing decision. And if they weren't feeding the sets HD at the store's launch, I wonder if they even laid the cabling infrastructure required to support feeding HD to each set.
Circuit City and the local Tweeter do run HDTV feeds to their HD-capable TVs. I'll definitely do my TV shopping somewhere other than Best Buy until they get serious about the technology they're selling.