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05/23/04
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Essay: Falling in love again - with HDTV
By LAWSON TAITTE / The Dallas Morning News
My life has changed. I watch travelogs about Italian festivals and
out-of-the-way Texas nature spots. I drool over 30-second
advertising spots. I stare at CSI: Miami in fascination, convinced
it is one of the most innovative series on television.
I've always been a reasonably early adopter of cutting-edge
technology in home entertainment. Where television was concerned,
though, my family was way behind the curve. Our previous set dated
back to 1978 a color console whose picture for more than a
decade had been fading to white at odd times, bleaching out most
of the image for extended periods.
We had sworn that we wouldn't buy a replacement until it became
economically feasible to get a high-definition set. We had fallen
in love with the medium watching a nature show, of course in
its earliest days, when a set still cost $7K or more. There was no
sense in settling for anything less, we reasoned.
When we were ready to bite the still-sizable bullet and started
shopping, we found we much preferred the pictures on the
old-fashioned tubes over big-screen projection models or even
plasma screens.
The next-to-largest size available looked huge to us 38 inches,
nominally. In fact, it takes two or three strong men to lift the
behemoth. It occupies a large space in a small living room. Even
in that small room, though, the image is so richly detailed that
we wish we had bought one a bit bigger.
The transition between our old set and this one is comparable to
the jump between a prop plane and the space shuttle. At first,
even the ordinary, non-HD digital programming provoked amazement
over its rich color and precise detail.
Only the start
But that was just the beginning. The difference in switching
formats between a regular digital channel and its HDTV equivalent
for instance, when both are showing the same commercial never
ceases to surprise us.
On a regular television, the luxury car is tooling around in the
ice, sending up a blurry white spray as it cuts a corner. On HDTV,
that spray resolves into its component drops and chips of ice. The
air glistens. The snow is soft. The automobile's surfaces have a
metallic sheen to them. You are in a different world.
That's generally the first reaction to watching HDTV: You're
seeing things for the first time often better than you would see
them in real life. Courtside at a basketball game, each spectator
becomes a real person, distinguishable from all the rest. You see
the blades of grass and the leaves on the trees in the Tuscan
countryside.
Such marvels of detail are not always a good thing. One of my
daughters observes that she never really wanted to see all the
actors' pores and blemishes.
Who knew that those glossy folks had the same dermatological
issues as the rest of us?
You adjust happily to all this enriched visual information. A few
satellite channels offer movies in HD. The quality is so much
better than a DVD that it is hard to pull your eyes away. Films
you never thought you would pay any mind to the puerile A
Knight's Tale , for instance suddenly seem enthralling.
Using the illusion
Some shows seem conceived visually with HDTV in mind. That
slightly grainy look of the now-canceled Boomtown looks fabulous
in HD. CSI: Miami's saturated palette of blues and greens,
alternating with a bit of ochre, is poetry for the eyes. Those HBO
series are all shot in HD, of course, and the astounding precision
and detail of the visuals on The Wire become a metaphor for the
series' moral complexities as you sit there with your mouth open.
That's not to say you won't experience frustrations. HD is such a
big boon for sports that it will soon enrage you that so few games
are broadcast in the new medium. Even regular digital reception
makes it obvious how many programs suffer from shoddy camera work.
The first few months with your new set, you'll get a lot less
sleep. Even after a year or more, you'll find that you never tire
of your yummy new eye candy.
Dallas Morning News theater critic Lawson Taitte is hoping an
affordable home recorder for high definition will hit the market
soon.
E-mail [email protected]
NEXT UP FROM HDTV MAGAZINE:
The
I LOVE HDTV
A National Campaign
More about it here Monday, May 24, 2004
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