t.v. is crap

phil and i went down to emeryville this afternoon to look at a possible new t.v. i don’t watch t.v. much, and don’t want to get cable or satellite (it’s not the cost, but the time expenditure that i am wary of). but i do rock the xbox quite a bit, and thought that it might be worth the competitive advantage to bump things up to HDTV. also, tina gave me a netflix subscription and i could take advantage of a tastier image for all those movies. such was my thinking at the beginning of the afternoon.

i’m going to skip all the boring details of the differences between progressive and interleaved, plasma, projection, LCD, etc. the bottom line is that most of the pictures just look like crap, or perhaps marginally better than the sony trinitron i have now, unless you blast into the $4 – 8,000 range. and circuit city is pretty much a joke. none of the t.v.’s are adjusted properly, the program signal is dirty as hell (how is this even possible with digital signal?), and the employees have less information than a cursory examination of a couple consumer websites will give you.

the strangest thing about the whole experience was then going to the apple store and looking around there at the monitors. the tastiest looking HDTV’s are the LCD screens, which is to say that they are basically flat-panel computer monitors. i am imagining there is probably a $20 difference in the cost of a different plastic box and receiver electronics around the screen to make it look like a “t.v.” and yet the retail price is jacked probably double. why such a disparity? there is speculation that apple will be moving into the living room with its product announcements at macworld tomorrow. that would be cool.