With HD televisions, if you don't have digital cable then you actually are better off using a CRT in terms of quality.
Here's what I do. I have an HD TV (for Seahawks games, and the rare TV show I actually want to watch, and PBS) in one room. But no cable. It has a Roku and Apple TV, but that's besides the point. The US Government required all local stations to
output HD signals a few years ago. So, if you go buy a cheap antennae, you can pick up HD local TV - entirely for free. I pay for internet, but not for TV. I get that over the air. And the picture, Shot, is amazing. It's nearly 3-dimensional looking. If you have an antennae on top of your house that you can jack into, you're freaking
super lucky.
That being said, I wind up buying per-episode shows on Amazon, and use a relative's Netflix account, too, neither of which output awesome resolutions, so I can still get my Game of Throne fix, etc. So I do buy TV, so to speak, but I buy it a-la-carte for what I want to see, and no it's not very HD most of the time. But I also avoid 10 home shopping networks and 20 religious channels.
Anyhoo, I've taken this way off topic, but if you ever want to see your HD TV literally sparkle check out the HD over-the-air signal being pumped right over your roof.
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As for the retro definition, this is how I think of it: if it's something I enjoyed in my formative years (I'm almost 45), and it faded from contemporary pop culture, that qualifies.
The definition, by definition, is very subjective.
And, it usually is some sort of entertainment or fashion. Can that form of entertainment or fashion make a come-back? Absolutely, but usually with a side-comment from someone that it's leveraging retro nostalgia.
Examples in recent memory:
-) Reboots of the NES and Sega Genesis (with baked-in games)
-) 80s synth-wave music and video game sound effects permeating pop music for the past 10 years.
-) The rediscovery of vinyl LPs, which Shot mentioned (I could talk at length there - it's a very expensive topic)
-) Games and systems which - for me - were all the rage in the 80s and early 90s. I was around in the 70s but most of what I hold dear is past that time. Some people today believe the Playstation 2 is retro. That baffles me, but for some folks they grew up with that thing. It is 16 years old already, so it is closer to two decades at this stage. (Time!)
-) Design styles can be retro (including fonts and colors) - again I always think to the 80s and early 90s, but it probably helps to put a decade next to the word to give people context. E.g., "That song is so 80s-retro." Labelling it with the decade helps put an image or sound in one's mind, even if more information is needed to fully "get" the meaning. It helps to pinpoint things a bit, in my opinion.
I feel like at some point, retro changes and simply becomes old. In my mind, that's what happened to the 50s and earlier even when I was a kid. Some kids in their 20s walking around today probably think the same about my perception of retro ("1980s? That's so OLD."). It's sort of a sliding scale, and is very subjective based on the person's own life, age, and experience.