Let’s Talk About HD

Posted by Kyle June 26th, 2007 at 11:48am In All Things TV

I recently bought an HD Plasma Display, replacing the venerable 27″ Panasonic old-fashioned tube television I’ve had for 7 years. It was a nice TV, with component inputs and even analog audio outputs, which is why I bought it in the first place. But as a person making a living from my knowledge of professional HD formats, I just couldn’t see coming home to a boring old low-res TV anymore. Plus, we have a television blog, and we have to watch a lot of TV. Why not watch it in HD?

If you want a really detailed and technical description of my decision to buy a lovely professional Panasonic model, you can read about it on my highly geeky personal blog. But on TiFaux, I want to talk about my actual experiences watching high definition TV.

First of all, if our experience is any indication, Time Warner Cable in Brooklyn is in trouble. Switching to HD turned our previously minor reception problems into major ones. Since we moved in we’ve had sporadic problems with Turner Classic Movies (and apparently MTV2 and Noggin—that weird cartoon channel that’s not Cartoon Network—but we never watch those channels) but when I got our new HD TiFaux (which doesn’t match the TiFaux logo anymore) plugged in, half of the HD channels were just gray screens. Sometimes they showed up for a day, but then they went away again. After a lot of calls, 6 visits from various flavors of cable guy, and some amazing acrobatics (seriously) we have consistent HD reception. I wouldn’t be surprised if this happens a lot more as people continue switching to HD cable. It’s going to add up to a lot of expense on Time Warner’s side.

I hope it’s worth it to them, because frankly HD is awesome. Pretty much all primetime network programming is broadcast in HD at this point. Lost is particularly beautiful. Ugly Betty really shines in all it’s tacky glory. And the movies. Ah! The movies!

You see, I’m not a crazy person with money to throw around so I’m not about to buy an HD DVD or Blu-Ray player because a) they’re too expensive, and b) one of them is going to be obsolete in a few years. So I only have two sources of HD content: cable and Maggie’s laptop. Cable is full of HD movies. HDNet Movies is pretty great, although their content is a little limited. For a while we were getting the premium channels, and they had TONS of movies. TNT HD has a nice selection, but they often broadcast 4:3 video stretched out into 16:9.

And here’s where things get annoying. Aspect ratios. We’re just getting to the point where most people are watching their DVDs at the right aspect ratio. But almost invariably people with widescreen televisions set them to fill up the screen and never touch the aspect ratio button again. So when they’re watching standard definition TV, everyone is stretched out horizontally, which is an insult to all the money those poor actors have spent on fad diets and personal trainers.

Since I actually pay attention to these things, I’m constantly riding the aspect ratio button. The Daily Show fills up a regular TV, so I put that on “normal” mode which leaves black bars on the side of the screen.

(plus I apparently watch it on the Canadian “Comedy” channel)

Mythbusters is broadcast in SD (where’s my Mythbusters HD guys?!) but letterboxed, so “normal” mode makes it look like a tiny window inside a giant TV.

So I have to zoom in to fill up the screen.

Widescreen DVDs are tall and skinny,

so I have to switch to “full” mode.

When everything is in HD we won’t have these problems. (We’ll have newer and more complicated ones.) And they aren’t a problem at all if you just have a regular old TV. Regular TVs are basically dumb. They can change channels and raise and lower the volume. HD displays raise the complexity of the living room exponentially. Some day in the near future televisions will get so complicated that sometimes they’ll crash and you’ll have to reboot them. It’s already happened with tifauxes.

Just be warned.