Path to HDTV

Step 1 - The decision

I'll be honest. The decision was fairly easy to make. In fact, the decision was really made back in the summer of 1998. A regional chain that's now making good roads nationally, Tweeter, was holding the first showing of a live feed HDTV broadcast that summer in their Burlington, Ma location. Having been a long time Tweeter consumer, I was sent an invitation for myself and one other. Knowing that more than half the battle was with my wife, naturally I brought her along.

In all fairness of course, Melanie has a huge WAF. For those not on the Home Theater Forum, WAF stands for Wife Acceptance Factor, also known as Spouse Acceptance Factor or other variants. WAF takes into account things such as acceptance or even understanding of many of the fundamentals of things that people like myself hold dear. They don't apply solely to home theater but many of the hobbies many of us find ourselves involved in. 

The more hobbies you have and the more expensive the hobby, boy you'd better hope for a high WAF. When my wife and I first met four years ago, I was only skirting the edge of my most expensive hobby to date: Home Theater. At that point I had only a simple pro-logic surround sound a cheap VCR and my pride and joy, a Pioneer laserdisc player. Like many anime and movie buffs, I found laserdisc to be very worthwhile but the prices made many things unattainable. As such I had a small library of discs (under 100 after 7 years) but they were favorites. And they taught me the basics of what home theater is.

Of course, that's an ongoing debate in and of itself. To keep it simple, to me home theater is about providing the best possible presentation of a show, be it a movie or TV series or home video, and understanding the reasons why it should be presented that way. For many years I've been a die-hard widescreen fan/original aspect ratio believer and still am. 

When DVD came about, I ended up researching it for several months before it arrived and then for 5 months afterwards to see how the studio acceptance was for it. Seeing that the pioneering studios were going forward and doing anamorphic encoded discs and trying to make the presentations the best possible, I decided to take the plunge and move forward.

My wife was amused to say the least. But, as I said her WAF is very high. She's as much into movies as I am, though maybe not to the detail I am in terms of how they're made and the people behind them. Let's be honest, when you can easily identify things like the directory of cinematography and list their last couple of movies, odds are you're pretty much into movies. But as the home theater was becoming my main hobby, it was something that caused no issues.

A year later, we ended up at that HDTV demo I mentioned above. Samsung was bringing out their first full featured models and wanted to show them off. I was certainly game, and Melanie was interested enough since she knew we were likely to own one at some point and might as well get familiar with it early on. We were treated to their 40" set first, which had some gorgeous playback of the James Bond Goldeneye movie playing up-converted to a 1080i image. Suffice to say I was incredibly hooked right then and there and Melanie was impressed as well.

We then went through a 90 minute lecture by several prominent people from Samsung as well as a regular columnist from one of the popular home theater magazines. The lecture did get quite detailed (much to Melanie's dismay) but I found it all very interesting to see just how everything worked, since a lot of was related to how DVD's work.

After that, it was a free session and we got to chat with several people. We also managed to make our way into the very crowded display room where their 65" set was playing the live feed. It was at that point that I knew my end goal (as if there really is one) would be a set of that size. We left that evening talking about plans of how to go about getting one, placement and all kinds of related things. Ah, sweet HDTV's in my dreams.

But we knew we had several things to accomplish first before we could go that room, the most important being home ownership, so the 65" set is definitely out of reach now. But this year, Toshiba introduced their new line of HDTV sets and one at an incredible price for the 40" set. I spent most of the summer gathering what little information was available and researching it.

Then they arrived. People started talking about them shipping from various places. Then people started getting them in their homes. Posts of joy! Posts of sheer pleasure! Information became even more free flowing at that point. The tide of enthusiasm became strong and more began to go under its wake and posted their conversion stories as they acquired the set themselves.

Armed with all this new knowledge, I began to sprinkle it throughout the various conversations I had with my wife. Of course, she pegged me on it the first time I casually mentioned it, but only with a knowing smirk. After a few weeks, we took the time to hit our local Tweeter store that had a display model set up and went to check out the goods. There was one surprise from it, in that the base/stand is an integral part of this unit. It's not something that you can separate, nor did I see it crop up in any discussions.

But other than that, it was a gorgeous looking set. The 40" model has approximately a 32" viewing screen, which is unfortunately smaller than the 36" set we now own from Toshiba. But we really don't watch a lot of broadcast TV beyond some prime time shows, and being where we are in Massachusetts, we're in one of the original areas for HDTV broadcast. But we're not even looking to pick up a tuner for off the air broadcast until next year as we'll deal with the cable broadcast.

We're in this for the DVD's. With a library of over 500 titles a large percentage of them encoded to work on a 16:9 HDTV set, it's an easy jump. With DVD, we got onto that bandwagon early on and were part of the early adopter crowd. We said we wouldn't be with HDTV and would let it gain some ground before we hopped on it, but with such gorgeous displays available and an incredibly low price of the TW40X81 model that we're looking at listing 2799, it became an easy decision in the end.

But first, there had to be a compromise... or so I was told.