HDTV

After 6 years of service, my old Sharp TV set’s CRT waved goodbye. Perfectly fitting a trapezoid distortion and wonderful colour errors, there was smell and smoke from inside the casing…

My inquiries (LCD or plasma ?) lead to this piece of equipment: the Panasonic TX-32LX52F (British equivalent: Panasonic TX32LXD52 ).

At MediaMarkt I was able to bargain the suggested retail price of GBP 1.260 down to GBP 1.155 (!), which still was GBP 35 too expensive in my opinion. guenstiger.de recommended Ton-Dose Dortmund for mail order with their “seal of approval” and a cheap price of GBP 998 including p+p. Spontaneously (1 day to think it over, saved GBP 157), I ordered the TV there and was surprised by an overnight delivery !

Overall, I am very pleased with it, especially when playing DVDs on my Harman Kardon DVD 25 , which does progressive scan via component connectors. Regular television’s poor interlaced picture and in any case DVB-TV’s sometimes even worse quality (lower resolution and bad MPEG2 compression caused by too low bitrates) become apparent quickly thanks to the LCD panel, and you can forget about image enhancing with the MPEG noise reduction mode.

Said that, I cannot understand why the TV set’s British model LXD52 needs a built-in DVB reciever (ok, nice feature though).

So the real fun will start with HDTV and an additional MPEG4 reciever. Luckily, my cable company already announced they will feed German pay-TV Premiere HD. While waiting for it and it’s often foretold breakthrough with the world cup, one can get a taste at Microsoft Windows Media HD Apple QuickTime HD Gallery and Movie Trailers (X3 !!) , adequate PC hardware required.

My most expensive piece of furniture now is the telly, probably making me not that unique. Finally, here’s a link to my DVD collection (enable cookies !), which will be outdated pretty soon due to HD DVD and Blu-ray…