Thursday, October 16, 2008

Channel Change Speeds

A French monitoring solutions company did a worldwide survey of the amount of time it takes to change a television channel using the +/- buttons. They found that the average channel change time was 1.9 seconds. Satellite services were about twice as slow. Systems that used Microsoft Mediaroom such as U-verse were the fastest at around 0.6 seconds.

My experience with the ATSC and QAM tuners of HDTV's is that channel changes are in the one to two second range. This makes for some painfully slow channel surfing that actually have changed my channel surfing habits completely. I do miss the analog NTSC days when my old Sony XBR RPTV could rapidly surf through about 5 channels a second (0.2 seconds). Digital, and HD especially, offer a far superior picture quality but there were a few nice things about analog. For example; few HD devices today have dual tuners for true PIP operation which used to be a standard feature on mid-end NTSC TV's.

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