Today is the big day! The day we finally switch from analog broadcasts to digital broadcast for our TV needs.

The difference is displayed.

A funny thing happened today, while at work… I was asked to fix the TV. Mind you I work in the IT department, not the “general electronics” department. I figured I’d give it a look.

Our company has had one of those digital conversion boxes for 8 or 9 months now, and everybody thought it was working already all along. In reality they never had scanned for a single digital channel. They had the box hooked to channel 3. Kind of like how you used to use the old RF adapters to get your Nintendo to come in on Channel 3… Well, they changed the TV itself to channel 4, 7, 16, and the rest… completely bypassing the digital box all along. I went in, fired up the digital converter box, scanned for digital channels, and started using the correct remote to change the channels, and there we go. Digital TV, in all of its artifacting glory.

I’m sure the old people are going to be pissed at this artifacting. They’d rather have “snow” and EMI/RFI (Eletromagnetic Inteference/Radio Frequency Interference) than some artifacting on the screen. In fact some people here are in an uproar over the fact that there is pixels on the screen now.
Lets see… you have choices here.
1. A constantly unclear picture, with snow, and interference in the audio.
2. A clear and crisp picture with crisp audio that has pixelation artifacting occasionally.

The artifacting is just more noticeable because it isn’t happening constantly.