Life in liquid crystal

I have a love/hate relationship with television. Quality shows like Lost and The Office are a great escape, a chance to tune out my moderately stressful reality. I really enjoy them. However, if a show on my list is not airing, the last thing I will do is turn on the tube and channel surf. I'd much rather read or go online for my entertainment fix. Also interesting--when it comes to watching TV, I'm a completist. I can't watch 24, even though I know I'd love it, because I didn't see the first episode. The shows that I do watch, I've been watching since day 1 (except for House M.D. -- R pulled me into that one during the second season), and I never miss an episode once I start. If a show is poor enough for me to miss an episode, I'll probably stop watching it all together.

We entered the age of digital television last weekend when we bought a 40-inch Sony Bravia. The thing stands like a black monolith from 2001: A Space Odyssey in our living room. Its grand beauty marks our evolution in entertainment. This is quite a step up from the 20-inch tube set we've been watching until now. Frankly, it is too big for where we have it positioned at thte moment. We are working on mounting it on the wall, which will give us some needed distance.

The HD picture quality is very impressive to say the least. So much that it is exposing television shows for the facades they are. Now we can see the make-up on actor's faces. In some scenes you can clearly tell the action is taking place on a sound stage. There was a blaring example of this on the last Desperate Housewives: two characters were supposed to be sitting on some steps outside a restaurant--well, you could definitely tell they weren't actually outside. Lost does pretty well, however, because it's filmed on location in Hawaii. We've only watched one episode of it in HD so far, but it was quite spectacular.

It was surprising to me that HD broadcasting actually has a crisper picture than DVD. The real reason we wanted a new TV, after all, was for watching movies. I'm finally starting to see the reason for those new HD-DVD and Blu-Ray players. Still, the larger screen size alone, makes the viewing experience more thrilling. We are definitely noticing more detail in each shot. The higher production values in movies versus television are evident. Sometime soon we will be buying a new sound system as well, and then I will be re-watching a little movie called Star Wars.