Wednesday, April 18, 2007

Okay, so I've been viewing HDTV (hi-definition television for those of you that are acronym impaired) for the past few weeks now. And frankly I have come to the following conclusion: If you don't have it, don't get it because once you do you'll never want to watch regular TV again! It's like hi speed internet. Once you get it, there is no possible way you'd go back to using a telephony modem ever again. Sure it's crap loads cheaper, but frankly it just doesn't cut it anymore. I get about ten station in HD right now with my cable plan. I'm hoping that number will increase as time goes on. I get the important channels though; all my local stations, as well as ESPNHD (love the sports!), DiscoveryHD (Planet Earth in HD rocks my flippin' world!) and two movie channels, StarzHD and HBOHD (Nicole Kidman never looked so good!). Of course I have a few miscellaneous others like TNTHD that seems to only play episodes of Charmed and Miss Congeniality (just like regular TNT) and TOCHD (The Outdoor Channel for all of you that have most likely never heard of it before) where you can see that crazy hunter guy shoor black bear in the wild with a bow.

The beauty of the HD picture though is its clarity and color. I can see the pores on people's faces for crying out loud! Sure it may not be as attractive to see the extra forehead wrinkles or the small spot of poorly applied makeup, but it is pretty darn impressive. Why would I want to watch something in a 4:3 format when I can get 33% more picture at 16:9? In other words why watch puny square when I can get beefy rectangle [grunt grunt]? In reality there is no downside to actually watching HD picture. Heck even golf is less boring to watch because you can awe about the scenery when you start to hemorrhage from boredom of the actual sport. The thing that stinks about HD is that you'll wish all your channels were in HD and you'll be quite disappointed when you tune to the Sci Fi channel only to see Samantha Carter and Dania Scully in pitiful 480i resolution with black sidebars. In the meantime Donald Trump is living it up in glorious 1080i just so I can see in more detail, how ridiculously bad his toupee is. It's not really fair, but then Pam Beesly sort of makes it balance out I suppose.

2 comments:

Moose said...

You got that right. What I'd most like to see is a SciFiHD. I've got Universal HD, which shows some of the scifi show in HD, but not until a few months after they originally aired. I need my Stargates and Battlestar Galactica in HD.

Anonymous said...

Hey James

I'm in a tough spot -- my girlfriend got it, but I don't have my own HD. Now, I can't watch anything on my own TV. It looks terrible in comparison.

I've been reading reviews and blog posts about HDTV's, and caught this one. I also read Shelly Palmer's Technophobe's Guide to HDTV -- which gave me some good info, for when I can finally get my own set.

Thanks

Howard