- Plasmas and LCDs can solve interior design problems (or just make a room way more functional) if they hang on wall. Putting mine above fireplace (with wires inside wall) freed up space for another sofa in one room, and made media theater seating possible in another.

- I don’t have HD tuners yet as I valued my Tivo above picture quality, and HD Tivos had been too expensive and lacking local content. Tivo now leasing (like cable companies) and local content now available, so am looking forward to this…)

- DVDs look better to my eye, much bigger than possible on equiv. size 4:3 TV but crisp and vivid. Component video connection (3 cables) vs. S-video or (gasp) composite made a noticeable difference.

- Many standard TV shows are letterboxed which I zoom in on and lose a little bit of image but not enough to bother me. Artifacts are more noticeable, but I’m sitting far enough away so it doesn’t bother me.

To each their own.

These black bars contain no active picture information, so if the image was stored this way, when the 16×9 image was displayed on a 16×9 TV set, you’d be using a picture created using only about 2/3 the picture information available. Anamorphic widescreen squeezes the widescreen picture into a 4×3 frame whan stored on the DVD, allowing all the height to be used for picture information, instead of for creating those nasty black bars above and below the picture. When the image is viewed on a 16×9 TV, the TV expands the image horizontally to restore the correct image geometry.

As far as HDTV goes, when viewed on a large, HDTV capable display, good native HD content will leave no doubt as to it’s superiority. It depends upon your location and your taste in content as to the availability of HDTV programming. Most primetime network programming(except some reality shows) is in HD. This includes the 4 major netowrks, the WB, and UPN. On cable or satellite there is HD Net, HBO, Showtime, Discovery, TNT, and a few more. You can get the network content over the air, using an antenna, or through your cable TV provider in many areas. In addition, there is a tremendous amount of sports content available in HDTV. ESPN and ESPN2 are in HD now, although not all of their programming is in true HD. Many college and pro sporting events are broadcast in HD, with more coming all the time as more production facilities become available.

One thing to watch out for. If you’re using a larger, digital TV, many standard definition channels look terrible. That is for a multitude of reasons, but three of the main ones are: 1) Standard NTSC video was never made to be viewed on a screen that large
2)The video processing circuitry used for processing standard definition video in many mainline TVs is fairly poor.
3)Many digital cable systems and satellite systems use a fair bit of compression to allow more channels to be squeezed into the available bandwidth. The more squeeze, the worse the picture. Unfortunately, “100% digital quality” can mean crap sometimes.

Dave Says:
June 1st, 2006 at 12:37 pm

The silliest thing about this long rant is that it does not factor in watching movies on DVD.

Personally, I spend most of my time (when I’m using the TV) playing console games or watching movies on DVD. I happen to watch 1-3 TV shows per week, depending on whether or not they are airing new episodes of those 3 shows.

I could definitely understand not wanting a large HD set if your primary use is just watching regular old NTSC television broadcasts, but that’s far from the ONLY usage.

The silliest thing about this response is that the poster doesn’t realize dvd’s are all standard definition, rendering his assertions moot. That’s the whole reason HD-DVD and bluray is coming out.