Joining Modern Society for a Brief Moment
I always said I’d hold on to my old CRT TV until it went because HDTV was a mess of ideas and differing cables and whatnot that I really didn’t want to get in the middle of while a transition was taking place. Whelp, the front panel board in the old TV started to give way some years ago with the remote sensor dying and recently Leah claims it was turning on and off randomly (though, I think itty bitty fingers were involved, myself). That, however, made me wonder if things had settled down enough from the last time I checked in on the technology so that I could make a long-term buy, finally.
It turns out that, yes, things have settled down quite a bit. Connections are HDMI or composite, the U-verse box supports both and I have a dozen HD channels sitting there waiting. So, we poked around and found out that Sam’s had a Vizio 32” set for $340 until Monday. I price-checked, and that’s about $10 under the lowest I could find it for. It appeared to have enough inputs for what I needed and, most importantly, it would have a working remote. :)
So I went off and brought home the kill and tore it apart in the living room while Fingers and The Mom were out and set it all up. Turns out, the audio for this particular set sucks wet ass. It sounds like The Chipmunks impersonating Barry White. I figured it was time, then, to nab a cheap 5.1 system to go with it. I hit Fry’s up and got a $99 DVD/5.1 job and brought it home only to discover over the course of the day that it wasn’t decoding any audio signals from the TV and was only giving L/R audio (not even center or the subwoofer). Internet confirms, it’s a piece of crap. Back it went.
Then Leah voiced something I thought about at the start: why not hook up the old 4.1 computer speakers from the Airport Express? Well, the TV supported variable audio out, so that could work. Tried it, worked fantastically. It sounded better than the DVD kit, certainly (which only used all speakers when playing DVDs — BOOOO).
So, end result?
* Mac Mini over a DVD-HDMI cable with minijack-to-RCA for audio (the Vizio has a special HDMI port that takes audio from an audio pair, thank God).
* U-verse over component because I’m not paying for an HDMI cable if I don’t have to (even if Fry’s has them for $10 and Monoprice has them for $3). I just took two old A/V cables and left the final video cable dangling. Who cares? It works.
* Wii over composite. The component cables were $20 at Fry’s. The Wii only does 480i, so why bother with anything fantastically accurate? This looks good enough.
When I plugged the DVI-HDMI cable in, Mac OS X offered all the HD monitor modes. I just picked 720p out of the list and turned on overscan (I thought you didn’t need that for digital? Turns out you do.) and it looks like a perfect computer display. Hulu is gorgeous.
More than that, however, today happened to be Bond day on Siffy. I nabbed Casino Royale and Goldfinger (remastered) as HD. The “new” Goldfinger is amazing and Casino Royale is simply impressive — especially the opening chase scene.
It’s *almost* enough to reconsider my Blu-ray stance. Almost. The HD Tax on the media will keep me away for a long, long time. That, and the aggressive copy protection being used (I bought a copy, let me use it).
Now if only Hulu would put shows up in 720p instead of simply standard widescreen, I’d be in heaven. For now, I’ll live with Discovery HD. :)
