Analog TVs still on the market; retailers fined

Analog televisions won't work for actually watching broadcast TV come February 17, 2009, when the industry pulls the plug on analog and makes the big switch to digital, but you wouldn't know it from big retailers like Sears, K-Mart, Wal-Mart, and CompUSA. They're still selling analog TVs, at least they were until very recently.

Seven retailers in total were fined almost $4 million by the FCC for selling old-technology sets without appropriately warning consumers that they would soon be out of date. While analog TVs will still work with many cable boxes, and can always be used as output devices for things like DVD players and game consoles, they won't be able to pick up over-air broadcasts at all. It's estimated that some 20 million households rely on analog broadcasting as their sole means of receiving television.

The biggest issue, per the FCC, isn't that the sets were still being sold, but that they were sold without labeling that indicated the upcoming problem with reception. The FCC is probably also miffed that, though all the big retailers said they would be taking "a leadership role" in educating buyers about the analog-to-digital transition, some 81 percent of retailer sales staff gave bad information about digital converter boxes or didn't know they existed.

The good news is that, in a quick spot check of these merchants' online stores, I couldn't find any TVs for sale that didn't include digital tuners, so either the retailers have learned their lessons or they're dumping the remaining analog sets only in stores. I expect anyone reading this column has already upgraded to a digital TV, but please remember to spread the word among your less tech-savvy friends.

For more information on the digital TV transition, visit www.dtv.gov. 

Photo credit: Early Television Museum