Hi-Def in the House!

I’m a gadget freak, I’ll admit it. So, instead of buying a new camera (something I dearly want but in no way can justify, even to my deepest, darkest self), The Wife and I spent our hard-earned cash on something for both of us. Yes, welcome us to the 21st century, we bought a HDTV!

We got a 32" LCD that looks real nice for the low price we paid for it. It’s a Vizio, and was on sale at Sam’s Club and I like it a lot. It’s got a great picture, it’s own built-in tuners for on the air HDTV, 2 HDMI inputs, a VGA PC input, 2 component inputs and a couple of RCA composite inputs. More inputs than most of the others we looked at in the same price range. It also has an unfortunate design feature that has been compared to "an indentation reminiscent of the cable guy’s backside" but who really cares? We replaced a 10+ year old RCA 27" tube set that was starting to fuzz out a little bit and whose weight was severely bending the "wood" in the cheesy u-build-it cabinet we had for it.

Of course once we bought the HDTV, we had to get a HD cable box from our local provider and we ended up paying an extra $10 or so for an dozen HD channels. Some are great, like HDNet, Discovery HD Theater and HBO in HD, but some of them are network channels who say they are HD signals but actually have very little HD content. Almost all of their new shows are in standard def 4:3, which means with the 16:9 HD screen ratio, you get black letterboxes on the sides of the screen. But even still, the standard def programs look very nice when upconverted to 720p resolution. BTW, very easy to connect the cable box to the HDTV, just one HDMI cable from the cable box to the back of the set and you’re done!

So, since we had this ’fancy’ new TV, we had to change our DVD player to catch up, which was no big deal, really. The one we had was old and the remote must have wandered off to a new dimension, I guess. We got a Toshiba that upconverted standard DVDs to 720p and makes for a fine movie watching experience. Again, one HDMI cable from the DVD player to the HDTV and we were all set. NOW you know why we wanted a HDTV with more than one HDMI input! Remember that when you do your own shopping, boys and girls.

More later, after we’ve lived with this new setup for a while…

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