living life in high def

A couple weeks ago I finally decided to go ahead and get a HDTV for my apartment.  I’d been looking for quite a while, shopping around online and at stores, and decided finally to just get a Best Buy store brand, a 27″ Insignia.  The price was decent..  got it home, hooked it up…  stuck pixel.

For those who don’t know what this is, it’s when one of the thousands of small colored lights (called pixels) that make up a tv screen gets stuck either on a single color, or stuck in the off position.  So I pretty much had a constant dot in one section.  Now, from a distance, this is hardly visible.  Unless you know it’s there.. in which case you can’t stop looking at it.  On top of that, I found that the Insignia just didn’t have the dark black levels that I wanted.  Black on that tv looked more like… dark gray.
I took that guy back to Best Buy the next day, but they didn’t have any others so I just got my money back.

That was HDTV #1.

I took my refunded money, went across the street to Walmart, and found a Sanyo tv that was a similar price.   Brought it home and hooked it up and… sonofabitch, there was a stuck pixel.  A constant blue dot.
That was HDTV #2.

Frustrated, I packed it up and took it back to Walmart, who exchanged it for the same model, which finally has no apparent issues (knock on wood).

So I finally had the TV.  The HD Receiver was another matter.  I had gotten one the morning after I first bought the TV, hooked it up and it worked fine for a couple hours, until all of the guide information was broken, and half my cable channels were missing.  Comcast tech support sent some refresh commands to it but by the next morning it was still broken, so I returned it.

The next night I put in HD receiver #2, and found it had the opposite problem of the first one… now I got ALL the channels, even all the pay channels, which I shouldn’t have been getting.  This only lasted a couple hours until I was back to missing most of the programming.  Seriously, I was not having good luck.

I made an appointment to have a tech come out to the apartment, but that day he called me after having done some work outside and things seem to have worked fine since then.

Finally.  It only took like a week.
So my impressions of HD, now that I have it set up finally, are that it is superb..  it makes me really not like watching standard definition (SD) programming.  The problem is, Comcast only has about 10 HD channels at the moment, but I find that the TV is more often on one of those 10 than anything else.  Sports is fantastic in HD, as are nature programming on Discovery.  It’s only a matter of time until everything is shown this way, and I can’t wait.