Surprisingly enough, it was in high def. Not all of the cameras are HD, but enough of them are to make it a worthy effort. Cool!
Sadly, Chef Ramsay has a pack of losers this season. There’s not a stand-out amongst them. None of them can cook. None are go-getters. Most are whining ninnies. It’s a stumble to the finish line to see whose last leg breaks last. Sad.
Call me terribly old-fashioned, but the first thing I tested out my new HDTV with was a DVD. I know, I know. That’s not true high definition. Heck, on a 1080p TV, a DVD is puny, weighing in at a fraction of the resolution. But with the help of an upconverting DVD player, it’s really a fun way to test a new TV using video you’re familiar with.
And, sure enough, the first thing I popped in was THE ROCK. I’ve always used that car chase scene as my demo disc. While it looked fine on the new TV, I was blown away when I skipped ahead a bit. Go to the scene where the military men — led by Goodspeed with the aid of Sean Connery — come out of the water and enter Alcatraz. It’s a relatively dark scene, with some bright flares of flaming light. It blew me away. The images were as clear as could be. The widescreen aspect ratio looked huge on the widescreen television set. It was as close to the movie theater experience at home as I’ve ever been able to muster.
What didn’t look nearly as good was the STAR WARS DVDs. I plunked in Episode 2 to check out a couple of scenes. I skipped straight to the action scene through the busy skyways of Coruscant. Everything was so crisp and clear that it looked like a cheap kiddy movie, filmed with actors looking silly in front of green screens. There was no separation between the two, and everything wound up looking like, well, a green-screened CGI movie. Sad, really.
I watched a couple of scenes from X-MEN 2, as well, which looked nice. As did KILL BILL Part One. Nothing overwhelming, but very nice.
Last night, we sat down to watch a complete movie. One of the things that should be in everyone’s home theater demo kit is a PIXAR movie. There’s magic in those images. Between the clear animation, the bright colors, and the subtle gradations, reflections, textures, etc., it gives your TV the chance to shine. While CARS is a moderately decent movie, suffering from being about a half hour longer than it really needed to be, it’s a great demo disc. It fills the screen up and has enough landscape shots to really wow you. There’s one shot of the open road about an hour and five minutes into the movie — just when Lightning briefly considers breaking for it after Sally filled up his gas tank — that I had to rewind back to. It’s such a beautiful shot that you could easily mistake it for reality. Every shadow, every shade, every texture works together beautifully. PIXAR spent some time on other large scale landscape angles, and they’re all worth a viewing. Take a look at the scene where Sally takes Lightning out for a drive. Just great to look at.
HDTV is a thing of beauty. By the time I had everything set up on Friday night, I was able to catch the Yankees game, which was on the west coast and so beautifully timed. I’ve seen high def golf and baseball and football before. Seeing it in your own home, though — it’s really cool. It took my eyes a couple of minutes to adjust to having everything looking that sharp — and, yes, I did turn down the sharpness a tad from the factory settings — but it all looked amazing after that.
I also laid eyes on TNT HD, National Geographic HD, Discovery HD, and the major networks. Beautiful stuff, all around, though there’s still a frustrating lack of HD content on the major networks outside of prime time. Even worse, all the good HD shows I’d like to watch don’t come back until January — LOST, 24, and AMERICAN IDOL. It’ll be a long wait.
On the sad side, TiVo looks like crap. Nothing you can do there. Just record everything at highest quality and hope for the best. In the meantime, I’ll record as much as possible on the HD DVR from the cable company. The interface sucks, but you can’t argue with the video quality. TiVo will work well for when three things are on at the same time, or for recording shows where video quality isn’t all that important.
Right now, I’m hoping the format war and the price points shake out in time for Christmas so I can push this TV with true high def DVD content.
It is up and running. I’ll do a rundown of first impressions of picture quality and whatnot later, but to answer the first questions about setting it all up:
Not that bad. And having done it once, I’m sure I could do it in half the time if a friend needed help.
Before I lugged the TV up the stairs — thanks to Bro-in-Law Andrew for the extra set of muscles — I had everything unplugged, rewired, and ready to go. The HD DVR was in place, plugged in, with an HDMI cable sticking out of it. The new Upconverting DVD player was set up the same. The TiVo had new component cables sticking out the back. I set the Wii off to the side for later, but I had component cables at the ready.
The TV came out of the box easily enough, and was a light 50 pounds. Everything plugged into the back very quickly and obviously. The only mistake I made was in crossing up the blue and green component cables from the TiVo player. When I heard sound and saw no picture, I looked behind the TV and caught that.
The HD box followed the directions that came with it to a tee. Once I powered it up, it took a few minutes to download information, then displayed four blanks. That was my signal to call the cable company’s automated phone line to activate HD service. Two minutes later, the little “1080″ light lit up and we were good to go.
Once I figured out that I had to be looking at the DVR input screen and not attempt changing the channels on the TV, itself, everything went bump-free. I would like to figure out how to get the remote for the DVR to change the volume on the TV, but other than that, everything is working smoothly enough.
The Upconverting DVD player has settings right on the front for your particular TV’s resolution. I cranked it all the way up to 1080p.
I haven’t turned the Wii on, though it is all plugged in now. I have it laying flat under the TV screen so I can access it.
The final deal I swung at Best Buy wasn’t as great as I was hoping for, but it worked. I had arranged ahead of time via the phone to pick up the TV at the local store. The on-line deal was that you’d get the TV along with a free upconverting DVD player. That’s a $100 savings there. When I got to the store, they didn’t want to take the price match, because they couldn’t match an on-line only offer and all I had was a printout of a web screen.
I threatened to walk out. I had been to PC Richards and Circuit City earlier in the day. I KNEW that they had the TV for $200 less in those locations, and they were less than five minutes down the street. When the manager heard me say that, he swooped in and authorized the price match, but wouldn’t do that AND give me the free DVD. I could have one or the other. So I took the price match and paid for the DVD player. I still came out $100 ahead.
Best Buy only had Monster Cable HDMI wires, which was annoying, but I was so excited at that point that I paid $110 for two of them. I felt stupid about that as soon as I walked out of the store, so I ran over to WalMart on the way home. They had Phillips HDMI cables for half the price. I picked those up and will return the Monster wires to Best Buy later this week. I’ll come out $50 ahead on that part of the deal, too.
Oh, and I was authorized for a Best Buy credit card, so I have 0% financing for the next year and a half. That worked out well. Dangerously, I have a $5000 line of credit at Best Buy.
Coming up later this weekend: How it all looks and sounds. (See my Twitter postings last night for first impressions.)
The release of the iPhone next week isn’t so much an interesting date as it has become an event. I have no plans to buy one of these at all, but I want to be at the mall when the Apple store reopens to see the rush of people in line filing in, and the smiles as they rip open their boxes on the way out the store on the way out.
I wonder how long it’ll take to sell an iPhone? It’s not as simple as an iPod. There are contracts to be signed, service plans to be explained that haven’t been announced yet at all, etc. The Apple Store may only have a couple dozen to sell, but it’s going to take a while, relatively speaking, to sell them.
This ought to be interesting.
AppleInsider | Apple retail stores to close, re-open ahead of iPhone
Apple’s over 170 national retail stores will follow a similar procedure to those of AT&T’s on June 29, closing for approximately 90 minutes in late afternoon before reopening with the first iPhones for sale.
The plan was documented in an internal AT&T memo sent to store managers last week regarding organizational procedures for the Apple product launch. Store managers on both sides are preparing for unusually large levels of traffic and have been told to forewarn their landlords and acquire stanchions.
“In order to prepare for the launch we plan to close our stores 1 1/2 hours prior to launch time, at 4:30 PM,” the memo said. “If the landlord questions your plan to close the store from 4:30 - 6:00 PM, explain that all AT&T and Apple stores nationwide intend to follow this plan.”
At the beginning of the year, certain things were a fait d’accompli:
It’s only a matter of time before the iPhone ships without the phone stuff inside of it, but that’s not going to happen right away. Apple doesn’t want to steal any thunder away from the phone. DRM-free music has begun, but still no Beatles. The rest of it still hasn’t happened. I think the BitTorrent part is the least likely, which means it’ll be the first to actually happen. Just you watch.
I wonder what else may or may not happen next. Conventional Wisdom dictates that a major iMac revision with a new industrial design is lined up for later this year. Is that really going to happen? Or is this another pipe dream?
I don’t care what the judges thought; I thought the Paso Doble at the end was amazing. I was impressed by how they used the staccato beat of the music to let the dancers zip-and-pose, like classic animation. It also, I’m sure, helped cover up the technical deficiencies there might have been from a pair of dancers unschooled in the style, including a woman who’s never worn heels before.
On the other hand, I thought the stepping dance was a turn-off. I was really looking forward to it, but the whole thing came off as a lumbering mess to me. Oh, well.
Looks like Cedric is in trouble again. His solos are amazing and I look forward to seeing one tomorrow night, but I just don’t think he’s a strong enough dancer to compete on this show with the rest.
I’m buying the Sony HDTV tomorrow night.
My wife was kind enough to stop at the local cable store to trade in our standard DVR box for an HD DVR box. I just cracked it open and was quite pleased to note a few things:
First, that it does have an HDMI port on it. For some reason, I saw something on-line that didn’t indicate that. I thought I’d have to stick with component cables. Not bad, but I have a TV coming with two HDMI inputs and I’d like to use one. Well, now I can.
Second, the box came with a set of component cables! I can use that for the TiVo.
Third, this all means I’ll have enough ports. I will have the cable box hooked into the TV with one HDMI, the other being used for the DVD upconverting player I intend to pick up at the same time. The component video jacks will be used for the TiVo and the Nintendo Wii, for which I already have the wires.
Fourth, there’s a SATA port in the back, made to allow you to hook up external hard drives to expand the recording capacity of the box. Interesting thoughts for the future, there. . .
Now let’s hope installation goes smoothly tomorrow, or this will be one grumpy blog over the weekend.
Watched an episode tonight. Egads, how I miss televised animation that was this clever and, well, ANIMATED.
In a “Hard Day’s Night” spoof, we’re treated to a pan through the halls of an animation convention. The first booth has a man in a blue bunny costume in front of the Tiny Toons Adventures booth (complete with musical cue from the orchestra). The second one is animated Batman (maybe even BATMAN BEYOND) with darker music coming through and what looks like Bruce Timm or Paul Dini signing autographs. The third has a sign, “John Wilkes Booth,” with a man in mid-19th century garb saying “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry” to all who will listen.
I laughed out loud again, 12 years after the first time that gag cracked me up.
Follow that up with the “Please Please Get A Life Foundation,” and you have a real winner. That’s the show that was in direct response to all the Animaniacs fans on-line. They were portrayed in the cartoon sitting hunched over their computers and spouting random trivial nonsense from the show that was the point of actual debate at that time over on alt.tv.animaniacs (or whichever USENET group it was.) The “Pay Or Play” versus “Pay For Play” debates were legendary and long-lived. Other useless facts were dredges up from the Culture Reference Guide and assorted message threads.
The Warner Siblings attempted to cure these lifeless losers by bringing them to their sanctuary and hitting them over the head with mallets, anvils, etc.
Ah, 1995: those were good times.
OK, so this is from a week or two ago, but I just found the scrap of paper where I wrote it down so now I have to share.
How bad is the state of journalism in the world in which we live today? One of those entertainment TV shows teased at their commercial break in breathless anticipation:
“Paris is in jail — are her hair extensions there with her?”
I do believe I groaned out loud when I heard that.
I’m leaning in one direction, but I’m willing to hear the debate:
Would you buy the extended warranty on your new HDTV from Best Buy? Discuss.
Important releases:
Best Buy has a deal on previous volumes this week, too. The language is kinda vague, but I think they’re half price. The third volume of Animaniacs has the “Please Please Please Get A Life Foundation” episode, which was a direct (and friendly) response to the A! internet fans, some of whom even toured Warner Bros. Animation at the time.
Everything else this week — including SILVER SPOONS Season One — pales by comparison.
Next week: More MST3K!
I think I’m leaning in this direction:
From what I’ve read in a couple of places, the model is about to be updated for the year, and that’s why the price is suddenly dropping so much on it. The reviews are really strong, though, and the price is right. It has the two HDMI inputs and some strong bullet points to it. Sure, it would have been nice to get a TV that would accept my camera’s memory cards into it, but that’s not something I’m actively looking for. I just know other Sony TVs have it.
I wish the frame were black instead of gray, but I don’t think that’s a big problem. I still want to go look at it in the store again before making any decisions, even knowing how screwed up those display TVs often are set up to play. . .
Augie De Blieck Jr. doesn't know when to shut up, which makes him the perfect blogger. That, and he reads a lot of other blogs. You can e-mail him, if you really wanted to.
