NY Times old TV story

[Robert Grant]

The sad part about this NYT article is that younger readers will completely believe the article and think that all TV before cable was snow, ghosty, rolled, and unreliable.

Only reinforcing the special effects on Mad Men that present all television viewing in the day as being by sporadic-E skip.

If you weren't between tall buildings, behind a hill, or just plain too far away from the transmitter sites, analog TV reception over-the-air could be excellent (unless one got too close to a big CRT where the inherent 480i resolution would be seen as unsharp). The first time I had cable (1990, long before DTV or HDTV), I saw some snow and moiré patterns in the picture on cable, so I would switch to the antenna to watch the local stations, even though they were on cable.

Another fact is that many of today's DTV subchannels with 480i look a LOT worse than analog 480i did due to compression (some 480i SDTV is almost as good as analog, but some of it can be badly compressed. When WNWO 24.1 has an HD program with a lot of motion, Retro 24.2 can look downright awful, like early internet video with a 56k telephone line modem. When the 24.1 program is not using so much data, the Retro looks a bit better).