I Love My New HD TV

We finally purchased a new television. Our primary television had been a 20+ year old Sony 19". Recently, the speakers started rattling after watching some concert videos and the picture has had some permanent lines running through it for a number of years, so I finally decided that it was probably time to get a new one.

Luckily, the prices on TV's have been falling. As usual, I was obsessed with finding just the right "value" TV. Not top of the line, but one that's recognized as a good TV for the money. I finally settled on the Olevia 532H and, so far, I'm very satisfied. A couple nice undocumented surprises were that it came with 2 HDMI connections (the specs said 1) and a QAM tuner (so that it can receive unscrambled digital cable channels without a box from the cable company for when you want to utilize the picture in picture feature). I had read on some message boards that it had a QAM tuner, but that Olevia does not advertise it.

All I can say is wow! High Def television is incredible! I've especially been enjoying the US Open tennis championships and the boys never thought Cartoon Network could look so good. One of the reasons we kept putting off getting a new TV was that we didn't watch much. Now we know why - our TV was so crappy. With the new TV and high def I have a feeling there's going to be a lot more TV watching.

I even bumped up my Comcast service and got a HD\DVR box. I'm usually pretty big on minimizing recurring bills (we've still got $15 a month 25 minute cell phone plans), but the HD channels and the DVR are pretty sweet. We had also recently signed up for the Blockbuster movie plan and were watching quite a few movies over the Summer, but have fallen off lately. It looks like there's plenty of On Demand movies from Comcast, so maybe we'll drop the Blockbuster plan. So many things to watch and so little time.

I spent most of the nights last week staying up way too late playing, tweaking, and configuring, the tv, cable box, etc. - much to Helen's dislike. She especially didn't like when all those late nights led to me getting sick over Labor Day weekend. And then I played golf, which took even more out of me. I'm feeling better now, but sickness for us at this time of year is always scary. We've both ended up in the hospital around this time of year after coming down with what we thought were just colds.