Our Latest Addition: Part Two

Our old 27" tube TV taking up too much space with too little return.

Compare to the picture at the bottom...

So most of you know I'm a bit of a movie guy. When I want to watch something I'm really excited about, I pull a chair up about 3' from the screen and put on my headphones so I can crank up the volume. I do this so that I can attempt to replicate the movie theater experience: A screen that fills my entire visual field and sound that fills my ears.

Still, this makes it hard to share the "movie theater experience" at home with Mitzi when we watch anything together. Plus, she's not that into sitting 3' from the screen. So I've been looking forward to getting a larger screen so that we can share a more enriching viewing experience together. The main dilemma I've had is our entertainment center. We really like it and it's just not big enough to house a 62" TV. Consequently I've gotten used to the idea of living with our tiny 27" tube TV for a good while longer.

Then a couple of things happened. First, we moved into a new house. In this new house, we set up our front room and I found that we were sitting much farther away from our little 27" TV than we had been at our old apartment. It seemed like it was so far away and even King Kong looked small. It was just not satisfying. But again, sitting 3' from the screen on a regular basis was not a viable option.

Second, this whole change over from analog to digital broadcasting by next year meant we were either going to have to buy a new digital converter box (Boo!) or digital TV. This one got me thinking. We've got this nice entertainment center being filled up with this big, boxy TV that's mostly packaging and little screen. Then I realized that many of these digital TVs have a much higher screen/packaging ratio. So I decided to measure the TV space in our entertainment center and realized something amazing. We could fit a 40"-42" HDTV in this space! That's an extra 13"-15" of screen! Brilliant!

Third, we had a baby just in time for a healthy tax refund, and we were going to finally be getting paid off by Aflac and Allstate. So I started number crunching and determined that we would have enough left over even after paying off the medical bills to buy...a 40" HDTV!

So I was on a mission. Almost every day off that I had since realizing these three things I went to RC Wiley, Best Buy, or Circuit City to check out our options. Finally, the checks came in the mail, and we took the plunge. RC Wiley happened to be having a sale on our model of choice and we picked up a real beauty for $300 off. We brought her home, set her up, and have loved every minute of her since. Here are some pictures:

King Kong was one of the first things I watched on the new TV. The T-Rex battle
was pretty darn awesome. However, I found that movies filmed in HD
(i.e. Collateral, 28 Days Later) come through even more impressively.
I stayed up late with our not-sleepy baby testing out all sorts of
different movies.

This is what our reception used to look like on our old TV using our sweet Walmart
antenna. The image is of a two-headed sheep pinata or something on PBS.

This is what our reception looks like now with our same sweet Walmart antenna

which happens to also pick up HD programming that comes in clear as day.
What an upgrade (This picture is cheating because it's a DVD,
but the clarity is identical - crazy! I wanted to use it because
of the baby in the picture).