New TV

Since the movers took away the old TV yesterday morning, I went to Best Buy after work to buy a new one. I had gone window shopping a few weeks back, and the Toshiba HDTVs looked the best to my untrained eyes. When I went back yesterday, they had one on sale, so I bought it. It was only a little bit more expensive than when I bought the last one. Plus, Best Buy is having some tax-free event this weekend, so I didn't have to pay any sales tax! Maybe this is some kind of DC-area thing, because I never remember not having to pay sales tax back in AZ. So it was a great time for me to buy a TV. The screen looks good, and it has no dead pixels, and the sound quality of the speakers ain't that bad either. And the TV remote has a screen size button, so it's really easy to switch between normal 4:3 and widescreen viewing modes.

So now I just have the problem of dealing with viewing a low quality video source on a high quality screen. It's like looking at all your digital photographs at 2X zoom. You can see some pixelation and blurring, especially in animated shows like the Simpsons. And because the cable all goes through the TiVo, it makes no sense to get HD service, since they would just be reduced to standard definition by the TiVo anyway. I bumped up the recording quality on the TiVo, and that made the picture a little better. I also turned on MPEG smoothing on the new TV, since the TiVo uses MPEG compression for its video encoding and playback. That also made a difference.

But the best part was when I booted up my PC. The new TV has a standard VGA input, and the screen looks outstanding. Even with Ubuntu I can use the maximum PC resolution of the TV (1366 x 768). I can actually read icon text now, and the desktop is huge!

Unfortunately, the Playstation 2 looks like crap now, and nothing really can be done about that.