Buying a new TV? Good Luck with that. Update and clarification

(Note this posting applies to USA only. I don't know what the rest of the would is doing. I would like some info and some links if you have them.)

My sister-in-law was telling be about a TV she saw at the store and was thinking about buying. After a she told me that it was a flat thin TV and would fit in so nice and easy in her house, I had to give her the bad news. The TV she was looking at is not a TV set but just a display. Based her confusion I have put together the following.

If you buy a standard TV set you need to know the Over The Air (OTA) standard analog TV signals (NTSC) are scheduled to stop the end of 2008 in the USA. Congress may change the date, but the cutoff of standard analog TV is coming. That's right, our old TV sets will be obsolete in 2009. No OTA channels 2 through 13.

Your old NTSC TV set may still be useful if you have cable TV or satellite TV. You may be able to buy conversion box to receive the new digital signals and use you old TV set to view them as NTSC TV.

Going out and buying a new TV is becoming different if not difficult. When you go to the store and buy one of those new plasma or LCD flat screen TV you are going to be in for a surprise. Its not a TV like we have come to know them. You can't unbox the TV hook-up the antenna and start watching. Its not a "TV set" but only a TV monitor or display. You will need to have a digital tuner/receiver for OTA signals. If you have cable TV you will need to have a cable box that has outputs for a TV monitor. Instead of one box, aTV set, a separate box for each function is required. Its becoming component TV.

Update and clarification:
Most, but not all, of those new plasma or LCD flat screen TVs do have an analog (NTSC) tuner built-in, for now. You need to check for a NTSC tuner before you buy if you want to view the existing analog TV signals.

Another thing that is different is that the new monitors are wider. In technical terms the aspect ratio is going from 4:3 to 16:9. That is about one-third wider. The displays that can be used with High definition TV (HDTV) are four times sharper. Oh, BTW, not all of the new monitors are able to display HDTV, so be careful when buying a monitor.

New NTSC TV sets are going to be more expensive in the near future. Manufacturers are being required to add digital tuners to some of their TV sets, starting with the large screens, 36" and above, and dropping down in size as the next year or two goes by, until all new NTSC TV sets have digital tuners. This will allow these TV sets to be used to receive the new digital TV signals.

Another thing to be careful about is that digital TV (DTV) may not be high definition TV (HDTV).

There are still some things to be ironed out. Current digital TV is using the MPEG-2 encoding scheme but it looks like MPEG-4 will be used in the future. A DTV receiver and or recorder bought now may not work for all future digital signals. Also there currently are no HDTV DVDs on the market. There is a new standard being developed so hardware (players, recorders and media) is a year or two away. Throwing a wrench into the works are content makers. They are trying to protect their copyrights by making it hard and very hard to record or copy their stuff by blocking the development of new recorders.

Its all very confusing. Hold your head and reach for the Aspirin.

The price for all this new stuff is high. It will be quite a few years before the prices come down.

This transition from standard analog TV to Digital TV and HDTV is going to be interesting. Interesting like the old Chinese curse, "May you lead an interesting life."