Most of the flat panels and LCD HDTV's TV's today come with tuners and built in speakers. Does anybody honestly use rabbit ears with these? I can see some people still using the built in speakers, but I don't want to. Nor do I care for these puny speakers making the unit bigger. What choices are there for someone who is wants a large LCD or plasma display with plenty of inputs for use with cable box and DVD player, but wants no tuner and no speakers?
I'd like to start a discussion on this and see what people have and prefer.
How about this. If the tuner is a typical tuner with 480 lines of horizontal resolution, you pay because they are cheap to install in the TV. If you are talking only HD tuners, you are paying because the US Congress, despite the protestations of manufacturers and retailers, passed a regulation back several years ago that stated any HDTV larger than 20" screen size must include a HD tuner. The trade people argued, at the time, the additional cost to the buyer would be around $400 USD and the tuner would go unused by most consumers of this technology who rely on cable or satellite for their programming. The roll in of HD and digital broadcasts was delayed from 2006 to what is now an anticipated 2009 date. Yet, the regulation stands concerning the tuners.
This is reverse legislation of Medicare Plan D where the industry lobbyists got to write the legislation. Here the lobbysist had no effect on the final outcome. Where's Jack Abramoff when you need him?
As to what options a person desiring multiple inputs would have; please understand features are, for the most part, what sells a TV now days. People in general have no idea how to choose a good TV and so, as with HT receivers, they choose either on a recommendation (usually a friend or a salesperson), a sale price or a feature they feel they should have. It would be difficult to find most well known brands of TV's not offering more than enough inputs to satisfy most consumers. The best quality TV I know of with the least number of inputs is the Pioneer Elite series. But, like Panasonic, this is a TV that is often used in TV studios and the likelyhood of not having the signal run through auxilary electronics is minimal. I haven't had any interest in the B&O televisions due to their outrageous cost, but I would suspect they are rather shy on inputs also as virtually all B&O products are meant to incorporate into a B&O system.
That's great background. I missed the whole debate about the HD broadcasting. So your telling me I'm paying for an act of congress?
In terms of the number of inputs though, I'm not sure we get enough, at least not the hi end ones. People on this forum seem to complain that they have an HDMI DVD player and a DVI cable box, but their TV noly has one input.
Now what happens if someone was to classify the TV as a monitor (as in a PC monitor) of gigantic size. Do you know of any manufacturers that build say a 42 inch "Monitor" without the tuners?