My brother-in-law has something I covet: a 40-inch flat screen digital TV. When we road tripped to his house recently, I got to see it in all its glory. He had to show me the difference between HD TV and analog TV, which was especially pronounced when the kids watched one of their animated shows. But even more amazing than the large, flat screen, enhanced color and detail was the caption capability.

The closed captioning feature essentially gives the viewer some of the control previously only available to a closed caption provider. You get to determine how you want your captions delivered. This means choosing the font style and size, the background color, translucence, and the color of the captions. You can even pick pink as one of the color options.

Believe it or not, these caption features are supposed to be the standard - called EIA-708 - in digital televisions. Unfortunately, depending on the TV you buy, and the way the signal is being delivered, you might not get these features - much less captions at all.

This actually happened last summer when I was at a friend's house. Their massive TV - which made us feel like we were in a movie theater - had all the EIA-708 features, yet couldn't display the captions. They were receiving their signal through digital cable, and something about their setup prevented any captions coming through at all, even the old Line 21 feed. Evidently, this is not an uncommon problem.

So that you too can avoid a useless TV, especially now that analog TVs are going the way of the dinosaurs, it's important to educate yourself on this issue. As consumers, we also need to push for this technology to be properly accessible. Larry Goldberg, Director of the Media Access Group at WGBH in Boston, has written an article called "When Good Captions Go Bad: HDTV Accessibility," that explains this issue in depth and discusses what consumers can do about it.

My house has the perfect wall space on which to hang a flat-screen TV. Alas, our current TV is nowhere near dying, and prices for digital TVs haven't come down enough for us. Maybe by the time we're ready to purchase one, the digital captioning issue will have been resolved, and I can happily watch my favorite TV show with captions. Hopefully, my biggest problem will be convincing my daughter to not turn the captions pink.

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