I admit it, I pretty much had to be dragged kicking and screaming into the brave new world of high definition television. I was happy with my 19″ SDTV, and frankly all the information the average consumer has to absorb to make even the most basic informed decisions was a little off-putting.
Last week, however, I decided to celebrate my birthday by upgrading to a larger television. After looking through my choices, I finally broke down and settled on one of the less expensive 32″ LCD HDTVs.
I like the television, while not as feature filled as others it does what it does well for the price. The problem is that this one purchase has placed me at the start of a chain of related purchases because of the upgraded technology.
HDTVs, for example, can actually make regular broadcast video look worse than SDTVs by their very nature of displaying a higher video definition. Any compression artifacts from digital broadcasts that are smoothed out due to the lower definition of an SDTV become crystal clear on the HDTV.
So that means I’m looking at an HD receiver to replace the regular one from DirecTV. Of course, it also means that I also need a HD DVR to record HD televion, such as the HD Tivo or DirecTV HD DVR. The former is still expensive, while the latter is on severe backorder.
And of course, now that I have an HDTV, any excuses not to get an XBox 360 due to not being able to see the performance difference on an SDTV have melted away.
When will the upgrades end?!
I had the same thing happen to me as I got a 26″ LCD HDTV a few months ago. Now I’m sitting here seriously thinking of buying a 360 and Gears of War, and later Mass Effect and contemplating how high I would be willing to go for a HDTivo.