HDTV Update

OK, I got my new Samsung all setup. The hard part was finding some new furniture to accommodate the display as well as the rest of my gear. I also finally setup my surround sound speakers, which I've haven't done since I lived at Licho.

So how is it you ask? Well the HD content is simply spectacular. Viewing high quality channels like Discovery HD is stunning (like looking out a window). I decided to keep HBO for now since it offers some great movies in HD (like Star Wars shown here). HD Net and Universal offers HD channels with a good selection of movies as well.

Watching commercial HD channels like Fox, NBC, CBS and ABC is also a treat. It's only too bad that I bought my set during the summer rerun season, but it's still nice to watch The Office in high def with crystal clear Dolby Digital surround sound. My set upscales 720p content beautifully, I honestly can't tell the difference between that and 1080i content.

What's not so great is standard definition programming. Compared to HD it looks pretty bad, although some SD channels look better than others. If all you watch is SD content, your eyes get used to it, but switch to a HD channel and its painfully obvious SD just doesn't cut it with these new sets. My advice is to wait a bit if all you watch is standard def and stick with your current set. Once the federally mandated NTSC cut over occurs this problem should go away.

Unfortunately the Wii is not really optimized for HD but some games do offer progressive scan and wide screen content, but Nintendo made games like Wii Sports and Wii Play don't offer either. This is when I wish I had a Xbox 360. I plugged in my original Xbox and played a bit of Halo 2. Although it supports true wide screen it's essentially a 480p game so the graphics look really dated. There also seems to be a graphical glitch where the textures are slow to render. I'll have to look at why later.

My older second generation DVD player couldn't display movies across the entire screen (plus the quality looked real bad) so I upgraded to a $80 Samsung 1080p upconverting DVD. What a difference it made! It's not quite HD but it's good enough to tide me over until the Blu-Ray/HD DVD format war is over.

All in all, its a great set and movie watching is so much more enjoyable now. What's really nice (besides the increased resolution) is the wide screen mode. On 16x9 movies, the black bars are completely gone. With the wider aspect 2.35:1 ratio, the bars are there but are smaller then on a traditional 4:3 set. There are ways to eliminate them but it compromises the quality of the picture or cuts off sections outright, so I just leave it in 16x9 mode.

I just ordered a calibration DVD which will help me optimize the contrast, brightness and colors for my living room conditions, so by next week I should be ready for a Kruddler Gears of Warfest. I'm dying to see what that game looks like on this display! Perhaps he can bring his new iPhone so we can drool over it (I heard the drool easily wipes off).

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Update - I adjusted my display using some suggested settings from the net and got SD to look much better, so now it's more than acceptable. Still not as good as a standard 4:3 set but SD looks good enough for me not to regret my purchase. Also I figured out how to configure the Wii to use true wide screen mode, I can also go 480p (progressive) but it requires component cables.
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