Cars and HDTVs
Last weekend... I saw Cars. It was very, very awesome. Well... that's a given. It was Pixar. To date, anything of Pixar's is just pure brilliance. I missed Toy Story, Bug's Life, and Toy Story 2 in the theaters, since that was during the not so get-out-and-do-stuff part of my life... and, as if I wasn't entirely convinced Pixar rocked, I chose not to see Monsters Inc... quite possibly my favorite movie from them. Man, after I saw it on DVD, I decided to never again miss a Pixar movie in theaters... and then Finding Nemo and The Incredibles came out and pretty much sealed the deal.
Anyway... Cars. See it now. There's absolutely no reason not to. It's G-Rated and I'm 21 and laughed at many, many parts along with everyone else in the theater. It's awesome. There's really nothing else to say... it's just... so good.
So after I got home, I decided to compete my personal Pixar DVD collection. I've been missing Toy Story 1 and 2 and Finding Nemo for... well... ever. For no reason really, except because... I was lazy, or something... I don't know. But I finally bought them yesterday. Along with the DVD set of the original 1979 Battlestar Galactica. Another one of those things I've just been putting off, but I know I'll enjoy immensely once I have it.
My TV died last weekend, too... I was all set to load up some leet Super Mario World gameplay action and... the TV wouldn't turn on. I was nooot happy. So I don't only have no TV to take to LAN parties, but I have no TV to play games on my own, either!! So I bought this from Fry's Electronics: The VEG Lite. Now I can play anything with RCA/SVideo outputs on my computer monitor. (This isn't a capture card... it pretty much just turns the monitor into a viewing window... like a TV without a tuner.) Hopefully it works as well as they all say it does... I have no idea what's a good product in this area, and nobody else I know knows... either... yeah, that kind of looks weird written out.
But I've decided that I want an HDTV, despite my rantings that nobody wants HD media yet. I made a discovery yesterday that made me realize how much of a leap HDTV really is. Okay, currently, most people in the US use NTSC. All interlacing technicalities aside, it's about 525 pixels tall. Think 640x480-esque computer monitor. That's horrific! We've been using this resolution for far, far too long. At first, I thought HDTV was only ever so slightly higher than NTSC... hah, boy was I wrong. I did some long looking yesterday and while I was comparing resolutions, it suddenly hit me... the newest HDTVs are declaring 1080i resolution. What the heck is that, anyway? Well, I starting reading around a little more and saw that 1080i TVs are 1920 pixels wide. Your typical high-end widescreen computer monitor. (Like my laptop!) HDTVs are 1920x1080 at a 16:9 ratio. Computers are 1920x1200 at a 16:10 ratio. I'm not exactly sure how to do ratios (one of my harder to remember math courses), but I think if someone were to do the numbers, I think 1920x1080 at 16:10 ratio instead of 16:9 would turn out to be 1920x1200.
All my jabbering aside... 1080i HDTVs are the equivalent to a 1920x1200 computer monitor. Only there's no black bands when playing a DVD movie on an HDTV. (Computers are 16:10, movies are 16:9... you have a little bit of blackness when playing them on computers.) In a sense, HDTVs are more specifically built for watching widescreen movies.
My fanboy thought patterns are kicking in... I'm imagining playing Halo 3 on an Xbox 360 on a 1080i HDTV in my bedroom... 45" widescreen LCD? Ohhh man. I want one. Maybe they'll get cheaperish for Christmas. Time to stop buying stuff and save up for a TV that'll come with me when I move out!