The new TV, or, HD is the most beautiful thing ever
I’ve been wanting a new TV for a while now. The urge has been particularly strong since last year, when I got a cheap Xbox 360 during Circuit City’s closing clearance, and then later found a delightfully inexpensive blu ray player when my old DVD player kicked the bucket. And yes, I’m aware that the 360 can play DVDs, but using the controller as a remote is a pain in the ass, and it’s really damn loud too. Stupid cooling fans.
Anyhoo, matters were made worse when I picked up a couple games – Mass Effect and Dead Space – that I couldn’t play much because all text – story, menu, everything – was completely tiny, blurry, and unreadable on the ol’ CRT screen. So, after a little saving/ebaying, I finally decided to take the plunge and buy me a new screen.Of course, I’d wanted a nice 1080p flat screen, preferably with that fancy newfangled LED technology. Well, I found a really nice one that was even totally affordable… but was only 22 inches. For my needs/available space, a 26 inch would have been the perfect size. Unfortunately the only affordable 26 inch TVs I could find were a measly 720p. And why would I want something so… so… low “high”-res? Surely with one of those, all the kids on the playground would make fun of me and my wacky backwards technology, right? *looks at giant blocky CRT tv* Oh right…
Well, being the smart fella that I am, I decided to do some research. And the general consensus on the interwebs was that, with a TV smaller than 40 inches, there’s not really much of a difference between 720p and 1080p. This site was most helpful, even though it’s a little out of date (it makes several references to the raging blu ray/hd-dvd format war). Fortunately it has plenty of nice little graphics to show precisely why fewer pixels don’t matter on a smaller screen. The gist of it is, on a smaller screen, the pixels will appear smaller and more closely packed together, so the lower resolution/fewer pixels won’t matter much. It’s sort of like on a camera, if you print a 3×5 photo, it’ll look the same if it came from a 6 MP camera or a 10 MP camera – though you would notice a huge difference between a 1 MP camera and the 6 or 10, much like the huge difference between 480i TVs/DVDs and the 720/1080p stuff.
So, I went to Best Buy and after the most important test – standing around staring at different TV screens like an idiot for an hour or so – I decided that yes, a measly 720p resolution could look pretty darn good on a 26″ screen. Though it goes without saying, there are plenty of other aspects that contribute to the picture quality (in fact, based on my research, resolution seems to be the third or fourth most important aspect; contrast ratio seems to be the biggest contributor to picture quality) and different sets from different makers will all end up looking different, so the store-stare test is pretty important.
But the point of all this is, I ended up purchasing a 26″ Insignia 720p flat screen HDTV, and my god, it’s glorious. I turned it on, plugged in my blu ray player with my $10 HDMI cord from Amazon, and sat around for an hour popping in different discs and just… staring, slackjawed. And occasionally giggling like a little girl on speed. Because… wow. When Leo and Raph battled on the rainy rooftop in front of the giant neon sign, when the Joker robbed that bank, when Optimus Prime took on all those Decepticons in the forest, when Neo wailed on the Merovingian’s goons in the chateau, when Kirk and Sulu dove from space onto that platform and beat up some Romulans… with every scene, it was like an angelic choir of angels was hovering around the TV, just spewing out all kinds of goodness and light. It was, simply put, a huge joygasm.
And then I plugged the HDMI into the 360 and, low and behold, I COULD READ THE DAMNED MENUS ON MASS EFFECT. It was another beautiful moment. And I tried out a couple of other games too, because you never know what important details you could be missing on the low-res side of things. And again I giggled like a little girl as the imaginary angels shone their beautiful light from the TV and straight into my heart.
So I guess the point I’m trying to make is, so long suckers. I’m gonna watch this thing ’till my eyeballs bleed.
