Closed Captioning TV

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patyrod

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Hi!

My elderly mother is deaf and is developing cataracts. We want to buy her a new flat-screen TV with the biggest and clearest closed captioning possible. Can anyone recommend a TV 24-27"?
 
All you do is.. go and shopping and ask for assist to check the size on CC whatever that satisfactory her sight.

I have know some TV that doesn't meet the size to my eyes and size of TV.
 
patyrod said:
Hi!

My elderly mother is deaf and is developing cataracts. We want to buy her a new flat-screen TV with the biggest and clearest closed captioning possible. Can anyone recommend a TV 24-27"?
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If your mom is going to use HD television services, the caption decoding actually needs to be done by the set top box, not by the HDTV itself. HDMI cables don't transmit closed caption data, and the FCC long ago required digital set top boxes to decode captions.

(It seems to me that many of the cable companies are doing a poor job of providing advanced captions because I've seen a lot of small, squished-together captions from cable providers. One might have better luck with satellite TV providers.)

If she's using an antenna to receive over-the-air television, then yes, the HDTV (I presume that's what you're actually looking for) will decode the captions. It's not clear what TVs provide the best captions, though. It's tough to find that out because you generally can't see the captions in the store (whatever captions you might see are usually being provided by the set top box, not by the TV).

I myself use over-the-air broadcast TV, which looks great and allows me to use the TV's built-in captioning. I find that the TV manufacturers vary greatly about their caption fonts; some don't get large even when set to the large size, and others do. I have a 2006 Sharp HDTV that has some good caption fonts and some unusable ones, but I don't know what the current status of their captioning is like now. Samsung is problematic. Panasonic didn't have a caption preview last time I looked but may be offering good analog captions.

Your mom might need an even bigger TV so that she can read the captions more easily. Otherwise, she might be forced to sit too close. Try to measure how far away she can read the captions.

One way of checking out the captions of TVs in stores would be to bring a DVD player with a battery and run composite video cables from the player to the TV in the store and then turn on the analog captions. You wouldn't be able to see the digital captions this way, though, unless you bring an antenna and can see a program in the store. Ridiculous, right? :roll:
 
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