Digital Television – Learn More

The evolution of digital television has bought change in people's perception for tv viewing. Digital tv replaced analog television that has been a useful and versatile form of broadcasting for many decades. With the advancement in technology, the old methods became obsolete, and then came the change in new digital format. Here is a brief on how each format works that will help users understand why the change is taking place.

How an Analog television works: Analog signals broadcast on a frequency analogous to the information it is sending. The antenna on your TV picks up those frequencies, and users could tune into a specific frequency by changing the channel on TV.  It provided a limited list of options, reason being the analog signals took up a broader bandwidth (about 6 MHz per channel), limiting the number of possible stations in any given area. With the invent of cable tv, customers got additional options, but it still sent signals in the same analog format.

How Digital TV Works: Digital TV signals, on the other hand break the information down into a series of pulses, each exactly of the same frequency and rate. A digital tuner then interprets them as a binary code i.e, a series of 1s and 0s, which is the same way your computer stores information. This allows digital signals to be much more compact, and hence they take lesser space on the bandwidth.

Resolution: As digital TV signals can hold more data as compared to the analog signals, the on-screen image on a digital tv service is sharper and crisper than that of a cable tv. Digital TVs reflect image resolution as the number of horizontal pixels that can fit on the screen.

Though there is an increased demand for digital televisions these days, analog televisions need not to be thrown out. Instead, you can use digital converter boxes that can interpret digital signals into an analog format and beam it into your TV. Digital converter boxes are very easy to set up and resemble a cable box in many ways. These boxes help you change the channel instead of your TV and should be able to receive local programming the same way you always did.