HD Really The Future of Gaming? 71
Eurogamer.com has an editorial discussing the "HD Future", as revealed in the Microsoft Keynote at GDC. In the article, author Kristan Reed argues that while the crispness of the HD Living Room would be welcome, "using it as a hook to hang next gen console gaming on is misleading to say the least, and there are more than a few barriers to entry for the masses."
From an HDTV salesman (Score:2, Interesting)
Having worked at Ulimate Electronics for awhile (before it went bankrupt), I've encountered most of the common questions/confusions regarding HDTV. Despite the fact the FCC is still hammering away at moving towards all digital signals by end of 2006, for the most part the general public is quite clueless about HDTV and digital television in general.
Alot of people I encountered believed that digital cable is HDTV. In realty, the compression used for digital cable usually makes the picture even crappier than analog cable.
And don't get me started about HDTV-built-in vs. HDTV monitors. Alot of people were dumb-founded that their new $5500 plamsa TV actually wouldn't be able to pick up HDTV signals out of the box, but instead needed to be hooked up to a seperate $500 over-the-air tuner to get any local signals.
And this is just for watching television . . .
My point being is that if Joe and Jane Public are confused by just the appliance used to display a game, they're probably not not going to understand how to get their gaming system to work in HD either. When I see a friend's Xbox hooked up to their HDTV with analog RCA cables (at least try S-Video), I realized that most people either don't know or don't care that they are under-utilizing their expensive investment.
Re:next gen (Score:2, Interesting)
I guess I haven't found any DVI splitters at any of my local shops, but I've found HDTV splitters at Wally World.