HDTV Rocks!

Holy shit!#^%*@$ HDTV truly is a leap beyond standard definition to which most people are accustomed. I posted earlier this weekend in HDTV Woes about some of the caveats of shopping through brick and mortar retailers. We survived without too much hassle. Setup took only five minutes out of the box, then I had to have an HD source because it was clear that the DISH Network standard definition broadcast was wholly insufficient to maximize the usefulness of the awesome Sony KDL-32XBR950 HDTV LCD TV (the final, most expensive pick). We went to Best Buy and picked out a Jensen Indoor Amplified Antenna, as per the specific recommendation for where we live by AntennaWeb put out by the Consumer Electronics Association. The website takes your address and determines where all the local, over-the-air HD signals are coming from and determines the best type of antenna for your location. Awesome. Once I plugged the antenna in and told the TV to find all the stations, we tuned to the Yankees-Red Sox game and whoa! What a difference over SD(standard definition)! The scoreboard consists of small LEDs and was immediately clear; under regular, standard definition, the scoreboard could be read, but the details certainly were not there to indicate to the viewer that this was supposed to mimmic an LED display.

I still have not had the opportunity to play enough with the TV or mess with some of the HD stations, but I can say that HD is spectacularly clear. Also, this TV renders progressive scan DVDs in a way that rivals theaters. I will provide more insight into the TV and local HD coverage as soon as I have the time, but I must say that if you are in the market for a new TV, get HD! It is unfortunate that DISH uses MPEG-2 to encode their standard definition, as it would seem that they do it very poorly. This is evidenced right away on our new HDTV because colors are washed out, backgrounds contain the blocks inherent to that encoding scheme, and the sharpness just isn’t there. Of course, any HDTV will show similar results with the same feed, so DISH needs to get off their butts and start offering more than just 10 HD channels and move from MPEG-2 encoding to H.264.

We plan to subscribe to their HDTV offering (only $10 more a month), but they have informed us that because we have not been customers for more than a year, we will have to pay for the HDTV decoder box. New subscribers get it for free. Subscribers for more than a year get it for free. Yet, the in-betweeners get screwed and have to pay for the box. What’s up with that? Maybe we will just stick to over-the-air for now.