Old 32 inch Hitachi TV in computer room was getting annoying:
- generally poor picture quality: lousy colour
- very poor picture quality when using scart lead: hence had to connect to PVR with phono so whenever I turned it on I had to manually switch it to EXT2.
- randomly turned itself off once a day or so, causing babies to start screaming at loss of 'In the Night Garden'. My hack had made this happen a lot less but it still happens at annoying times (e.g. ending of Titanic). Once it is in the mood it won't stay turned on for more than a minute.
- electric shocks when I fiddled with the aerial cable (turning equipement off when fiddling with cables is for wimps).
- original remote long lost by previous owner, programmable remotes can change volume/channel but not colour/settings.
So after some scouring I bought a 42 inch plasma TV. It's a Philips and it was £650 from amazon (compare to £899 for a 40 inch LCD in Currys). Ok Philips isn't the most popular make but reviews I read were enthusiastic. Picture is amazing, very sharp if a little too bright, everything is a bit cartoonish. Setting picture to 'soft' makes it ok. It seems to be lacking in front panel connectors but I never use those anyway. I was initially reluctant to buy a plasma as I heard they degraded faster than LCD's but apparently modern ones aren't so bad and we're talking 20,000 hours to degrade to half brightness on a tv that should only be on a couple of hours a day so it may be something to worry about 27 years from now.
I've connected it up to an AV amp and a big pair of speakers and it is fantastic. The built-in sound is ok but the amp and speakers put it in a different league. The TV has freeview (DVB-T) built in but the PVR is a much nicer thing to use: for example the guide in the TV is reluctant to show you what is on beyond the next program and doesn't show a picture. It also changes channel sluggishly.
Time to break out Dean's Firefly DVD set, now I have something decent to watch it on. One question though: is it better to watch Serenity before or after?
Peter's Moblog
After after after. It was made to bring to a close the series given the insanity of no series 2. So that is Serenity to be watched after Firefly! Phew. Hope I'm not too late.