tomorrow....

[NorthLineTony]

I will be a customer of Bright House Networks as I will be having Bright House TV and internet installed . $82/ mo.  In my Florida condo. I will still have Uverse in my Michigan home. Sorry, but they don't have Uverse in the Tampa Bay area. I was going to try Fios, but they don't have Internet where I am at.

[oufanindallas]

Gotta do whatcha gotta do.

[dhascall]

Hey NLT!  Just leave the keys to your FL condo, when you aren't there and I'll make sure that everything is looked after! 

[RCSMG]

Tony I could live that issue quite easily. 

[aviewer]

NorthLineTony - Hard to believe they would not include internet. Must have been one of those X-U-Verse lying sales contractors.

It is a shame because the FIOS picture is sparkling (in a good way) & I have not heard anything good about Bright House.

[NorthLineTony]

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dhascall wrote:

Hey NLT!  Just leave the keys to your FL condo, when you aren't there and I'll make sure that everything is looked after! 

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:-)

[NorthLineTony]

you have to pay extra for a DVR, but Bright House has Start Over in case you tune in late. I checked online with Fios, they have Fios tv available at my complex but not Internet. vShame, because the realtor gave us a coupon for a $50 gift card if we signed with Fios.

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aviewer wrote:
NorthLineTony - Hard to believe they would not include internet. Must have been one of those X-U-Verse lying sales contractors.

It is a shame because the FIOS picture is sparkling (in a good way) & I have not heard anything good about Bright House.

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another thing, my nephew let us use his  six year old Philips DLP HDTV. tHE COLOr wheel is screwed up, picture is OK for the first half hour, then the picture blinks and gets a humming sound. Costs 200 bucks for the color wheel.

[hpmsrm]

Heh.  I had forgotten about that particular weakness in the DLP design.....that mechanical color wheel.  Time for WD-40!  Seriously....maybe all it needs is a drop or two of fine oil on the shaft bearings.   I remember now....THAT was one of the major reasons that we bought the Sony big screen back in 2006.  It is all electronic.  Of course, as we all know, Sony had their problems also with the rear-projection units.  Ours seems to have been permanently fixed because we've had not further problems for a long time. (fingers crossed)

[NorthLineTony]

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hpmsrm wrote:

Heh.  I had forgotten about that particular weakness in the DLP design.....that mechanical color wheel.  Time for WD-40!  Seriously....maybe all it needs is a drop or two of fine oil on the shaft bearings.   I remember now....THAT was one of the major reasons that we bought the Sony big screen back in 2006.  It is all electronic.  Of course, as we all know, Sony had their problems also with the rear-projection units.  Ours seems to have been permanently fixed because we've had not further problems for a long time. (fingers crossed)

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Thanks, hp for the advice, hp. I'll let my nephew know, it was his TV, he pretty much knows the mechanics of it. I'll let you know if it works. But it will be awhile.

[hpmsrm]

I think the problems those earlier big-screen rear projection systems had must have been heat related.  I know that was the case with the Sony.  These mercury vapor lamps really crank out a lot of heat.  I know that every so often I have to open things up to clean out dust build up, clean off fan blades and make sure the grill over the air intake and outlet are clear.  Also I run the set with the power conservation setting turned on.  This drops the voltage slightly on the lamp and it does dim down a bit.....but not so much so I've been able to compensate with the brightness control.   We got ours in Sept. of 2006 and about 3 months ago I put our spare lamp in.  The old one did not burn out but I felt it was dimming down.  So now it's the spare on the shelf in the closet.

[NorthLineTony]

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hpmsrm wrote:

I think the problems those earlier big-screen rear projection systems had must have been heat related.  I know that was the case with the Sony.  These mercury vapor lamps really crank out a lot of heat.  I know that every so often I have to open things up to clean out dust build up, clean off fan blades and make sure the grill over the air intake and outlet are clear.  Also I run the set with the power conservation setting turned on.  This drops the voltage slightly on the lamp and it does dim down a bit.....but not so much so I've been able to compensate with the brightness control.   We got ours in Sept. of 2006 and about 3 months ago I put our spare lamp in.  The old one did not burn out but I felt it was dimming down.  So now it's the spare on the shelf in the closet.

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I guess it's not as easy to do with a Philips as it is with a Sony. I'll keep in touch.

[oz_1]

Be shure to run a UPS on those rear projection TV's if you loose power before the bulb gets cooled down it shortens its life tremendously if not imediate failure.

[hpmsrm]

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oz_1 wrote:

Be shure to run a UPS on those rear projection TV's if you loose power before the bulb gets cooled down it shortens its life tremendously if not imediate failure.

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Yeah and they are not cheap.   We've been living dangerously.  No UPS and the set is is almost 6 1/2 yrs. old. 

I imagine y'all get tired of my stories of times past......but the color wheel problem brought back memories.   Back when color TV was under development and the big companies were vying for their particular system to be chosen by the FCC as the standard for the U.S. .....CBS had their color wheel system.  Camera used ordinary B & W pickup tubes but the frame rate was synchronized with a color wheel with alternating color filters.  On the receiving end the TV set had a much larger wheel but it had to be synchronized with the signal from the camera.  It was clumsy and it was not compatible with existing B & W standards.(the system was strangely similar to Technicolor's system which used B & W films, each exposed to the image through a color filter. Either yellow, cyan or magenta)   The RCA system used the color mask picture tubes and WAS compatible.  So the CBS system got dumped.  Interestingly.....at the time the CBS system produced a better quality color picture.   So....when the University of Kansas School of Medicine and Medical center built a new building with brand spanking new, spacious surgical facilities....they included color TV to increase the number of medical students who could watch any surgery procedure at one time and they used the CBS system because of the better image quality. My pop was an M.D. and he and I were touring the new facility not too long after completion.   That color TV of ongoing surgery was my first exposure to color TV.   Boy that blood looked real.  Oh yeah.....it WAS real.

Isn't it strange how a long-ago memory gets triggered by some passing experience or something one reads.

[oz_1]

Never get tired of history and it still amazes me how we get television and especially digital thats alot of info coming across the wire or antenna then assembled into audio video and in some cases done extrodinarily well.

[SomeJoe7777]

CBS's field-seqential color system was actually selected as the broadcast standard in late 1950. Though it was a hybrid electronic/mechanical system (rotating color wheel used in both the camera and the TV), it produced better color and brighter pictures than RCA's competing dot-sequential system that was lagging behind in development at the time.

But the CBS system wasn't backward-compatible with black & white broadcasts. People were required to buy a completely new TV to get the color broadcasts, and advertisers saw no value in advertising on a broadcast channel that no one could watch. To top it off, over 10M black & white sets had been sold by 1951, thus there was a critical installed base that now controlled the landscape. Due to lack of revenue from advertising and the refusal of TV manufacturers to produce color sets in sufficient quantity, CBS discontinued their color broadcasts in late 1951.

RCA had finally solved the technical glitches with their dot-sequential color system by 1953, and was able to deliver a color broadcast using a signal that was fully backward-compatible with black and white sets -- a technological feat that may indeed never be equaled. To top it off, it was fully electronic (no color wheel), and ended up with higher resolution and higher frame rate than the CBS system:

NTSC (RCA system): 60 fields/sec, 525 lines.
CBS System: 48 fields/sec, 405 lines.

I won't go into the technical details here, but the engineering marvel that went into making a color signal that was backward compatible with black and white is a truly phenomenal achievement. And remember, there were no CPUs, memories, digital signal processors, or compression -- they did it with VACUUM TUBES, ingenuity, and a lot of mathematics.