New HDTV

So yesterday I came home around 12:30 to wait for the arrival of the new TV I ordered off of amazon. We’re replacing our 25 inch Wal*Mart special that I use to have in my arcade cabinet with a new 42″ Samsung DLP HDTV. Like Jen was saying its been a hectic week for my family and in dealing with that it was nice to have something to look forward to. The delivery was pretty painless. I walked the delivery guys in, they shimmied in the TV and it was a perfect fit. They plugged in the TV and I fed it a DVD to make sure it worked and looked good. It powered up and the delivery guys said “Damn, that shit looks nice aye.. congrats”. I too was amazed. The colors are very deep and vivid, the blacks are VERY black and the whites look nice too. I used a widescreen DVD as a test and it came up in native 16:9 which was impressive to say the least. The DVD player is some cheapie one connected via MonsterCable Ultra Series THX certified component cable.
Later in the day I went to Home Depot to get a long coax cable to run to the roof to connect to the roof antenna. I wanted to see if I could pull in some OTA (over the air) HDTV feeds. Sure enough I was able to with no problems at all. AntennaWeb stated that I live 17 miles from most of the feeds and that a basic roof antenna would work.

The family sat down at the TV and we watched Cinderella on DVD. The movie looked awesome. Its been digitally restore/remastered so all the flaws and colors have been fixed. the TV made the movies look 1000 times better. The next movie I want to try out is a Pixar movie.

Next up was connecting the XBOX to the TV. I ordered Monster Cable’s GameLink™ 400 X Component Video with Analog Audio cables so the games that support it will have a better picture (and widescreen for that matter). For now I used Composite connectors, the new cable will use component which will be better and cleaner. It will also make watching movies using XBMC support their native widescreen format.
After that I tried to drill a hole in the wall to run the new antenna coax and I had issues since my bit wasnt long enough. I gave up on the roof antenna idea since it was just a temp solution to a larger problem I would be facing later anyhow (upgrade to HD Dish Network). I was jones’n for some HD so at about 11:00 at night I got this idea… what if my powered AM-FM antenna I have from Radioshack could pull in the freq needed to display HD. Free is free, and most of my ideas are never like that, so i gave it a shot… it worked… and I was impressed. I was able to pull down about 30 feeds… maybe 15 were full tiime HD, some multi and other had multiple sub channels on the too. (see the top picture, thats of KCET-HD omg.. that picture was amazing, you could almost feel that waterfall). I stayed up late messing with the HD stuff, I was in awe.
Lastly, I’m going to upgrade to HD Dish so we can watch both OTA HD local channels as well as HD content off the Dish feed. Dish just came out with the ViP622 that looks promising, it gives you HD content and a DVR in one.