[Hollywood]

I recently managed to scrounge up enough cash to finally by the widescreen tv that I've always wanted. Of course my "old" equipment that consisted of a $400.00 dvd player had to be sacrificed to make way for the new era of HD technology.

Now, let me give you a breakdown of what to expect when watching a widescreen tv with analogue components such as coax for TV and RCA cables for your various digital devices. Naturally if your just running analogue cable then the picture is going to look like shit. Now, depending on the quality of the stations equipment used to send the picture signals, you could get a picture that looks very similar to a standard CRT television or you could get a picture that looks like a friggin mosaic painting.

Luckily, with digital cable you can get a much better picture, but it doesn't stop there. With HighDef you get beautiful resolution and colors, with little noise and distortion. This is due to the TV's ability to receive high resolution signals in the formats such as 720p and 1080i. But you probably know this already, so I'm not going to go into detail on why you should or shouldn't buy a certain TV or cable box (granted I have the DVR box coming on Friday for my digital cable hookup)

The area I want to cover in this already wordy thread is watching your DVD's in High Definition. You see, when I bought my TV I figured I would buy the expensive Monster Component Cables and I would be able to watch my DVD's in beautiful 540P resolution (progressive scan). Part of the reason I would do this is because my TV only has one HDMI port (many tv's only have one) and the cable box would take this port, thus my dvd player would be demoted to progressive scan.

That all changed when I bought my new dvd player, which is able to display picture in uncompressed HDMI 720p/1080i. I hooked the DVD player up to the TV, and popped in Star Wars Episode II. It took me a while to get used to the features, but I used the HDMI cable and set the resolution to the highest my TV would support, which is 1080i. BOOM, the opening graphics from the menu filled the screen and I was looking at an absolute perfect picture that filled up my entire 51" screen. I blown away, the colors were so rich and the fact that the contrast was up had no negative effects whatsoever (which if you watch regular tv you will know that having the tv too bright will make any signal look like shit).

I knew what I had to do, and it is what I feared in the first place. I would have to buy and HDMI switcher to switch from the two different sources, which would run me another $250.00. But this did not deter me, once I saw the quality of that picture I was hooked.

I popped in Toy Story II to see how the digital animation would look (you will notice if you buy a HighDef tv that digital film and animation look much better due tot he richness of the colors).

Yes this cost me a pretty penny, but damnit it was worth it. Of course, it does help to have a relative work at Best Buy who can give you that 60% discount on expensive cables.

Bottom line, if you are going to get a widescreen tv take into consideration how much it's going to cost you to get the best picture possible. Because using crappy rca cables and watching movies in 480i is for the birds, especially when it's as enlarged as it is on a big screen.