The latest craze in town is owning a plasma or a LCD TV or better known as a flat-panel TV. In fact, it is no more a luxury to own a flat-panel TV for the normal, old fashioned big CRT TV is difficult to find and purchase as it is being phased out, if not already phased out.

It is virtually impossible to find an old CRT TV nowadays. Go to any electrical store and practically the whole store, from wall to wall, is filled with plasma and LCD TVs displaying beautiful colourful content.

However, buyers need to beware. In the electrical store, you will see the image displayed on the flat-panel TV as being crystal clear and sharp, but when you take the plasma or LCD TV home and connect it to your Astro box, the picture is definitely not the same quality as the one you saw in the electrical store, to start of with.

The sharp and crystal clear images you saw in store which enticed you to buy the Plasma or LCD TV in the first place was actually fed with a DVD source. DVD being digital in format would feed a digital content to the flat-panel TV which is also a digital device, thus producing super sharp images.

Astro on the other hand is still analogue. And when an analogue source is entered into a digital flat-panel TV the picture is definitely not only not sharp, it is blurred. To make matters worse, most flat- panel TVs are in wide-screen format which is termed as 16:9 format.

But Astro, being analogue, transmits the picture in a 4:3 format, thus resulting in images elongated. You will see images of human beings as being thin and tall, sort of stretched unnaturally.

This shocks many people as the flat-panel TV you buy is expensive. Most people feel they have been shortchanged as what was displayed in store which enticed the buyer was completely different from what appears in your house.

To make matters worse, most people watch Astro most of the time on their flat-panel TVs and not much DVDs which provide digital content.

As our consumer laws are in the primitive stage, a buyer cannot return the item claiming dissatisfaction with the fact that the item did not correspond to what was advertised in the first place in the shop.

In virtually every other country in the world, satellite or cable TV providers have moved their operations to digital format. In Malaysia, being a monopoly, Astro seems to be taking too long moving to the digital format.

Though flat-panel digital TVs have been sold rampantly for years now, our sole satellite provider has not taken the initiative to inform the public about their official plans to move to the digital format.

In the meantime, all flat-panel TV buyers, having forked out thousands of ringgit for their new device, have to suffer with a substandard quality of image due to the fact that Astro transmits in analogue format.

The government should step in and push this satellite provider to move to the digital format quickly for it was the government in the first place who encouraged a sole monopoly to provide satellite services in Malaysia.

It was not pro-active in promoting several players in the market so to encourage the element of competition.