For the past few years, I have been using a fairly low-tech Sony Trinitron CRT television. It did not have high definition capability (HD), nor did I need it. After all, there was no HD content to view! This is something that has bothered me as the television industry has now sold an entire generation of sets having HD capability but with nothing to see. Current DVDs are not HD, and only recently has some HD programming started to appear on cable.
But I always wanted to get a plasma set. I know all the pros and cons of plasma vs. LCD vs. DLP, but I just couldn't get over the picture quality of plasma and the wide viewing angle. The problem was that my darling spouse has an entertainment center in our living room that is exactly (oh, how many times I measured!) 40.5 inches wide. She told me that I could get anything I wanted, provided that it fit inside. 42 inch (diagonal) plasma TVs were 42-43 inches wide. Every few weeks I would stop by at the Wilmington electronics stores to see if I could get my wish. Visions of chainsaws danced through my dreams.
While researching last week's column on camcorders, I wandered to the back of the store to once again look at TVs. To my surprise, Panasonic has shrunk their 42" plasma model to 40.2 inches! I did some research, and found out that this particular model had received excellent reviews and the price (with some incentives) was good compared to Internet vendors. So, I took the plunge! I also bought a new DVD player with upconvert capability. Upconversion plays today's DVDs at near HD quality - of course the additional pixels are being created by in effect interpolating the existing pixels, but the results are better than just viewing the DVD on your HD television.
I needed a couple of the new cables used for connecting sets these days - HDMI. You may have heard of HDMI, and also possibly of DVI. They are similar and both carry fully digital TV signals. DVI connectors are using on today's PCs for digital monitor connections. Besides having a different physical connector, the biggest difference is that HDMI carries both video and digital audio signals, giving HDMI the ability to connect your new TV to your cable box with only a single (albeit expensive) cable.
I got the unit home (a story in itself) and hooked it up. I also subscribed to the Time Warner HD service at the same time. The results were stunning and certainly (to me, perhaps not to my wife) justified the expenditure.
But, as usual, nothing goes easily. All I needed to do (I thought) was to run two cables from each of my "sources" (cable box and DVD player) - HDMI to the new TV and digital audio to the receiver. I did this and all seemed to work fine. But in testing I noticed that I was not getting the full 5.1 surround sound in my receiver when viewing cable. A little investigation revealed that the HD cable box has a setting which allows you to select digital audio to the HDMI cable, or to the digital audio output, but not both! The Time Warner installer had naturally set it up for the HDMI cable. Interestingly, in this mode the digital out still carried audio, but it was monophonic.
What to do? After thinking a bit, the answer was fairly obvious. When viewing standard TV shows and using the speakers in the TV, there was no need for surround sound. So I ran a standard two channel analog stereo cable from the analog outputs of the cable box to the new TV and changed the setting for the digital audio out. Now the receiver played the surround audio as it should.
But, nothing was coming out of the television! It turns out here that even though the TV is supposed to figure out which audio input is being used, it in fact didn't, and I had to go into the TV setup to manually select the analog audio input.
So now all is well, and I can sit back and enjoy those new HD channels.
By the way, HD DVDs are coming, but it you have followed the industry you know that the conflict between the competing Blu-Ray and HD-DVD standards is far from being resolved. I think it will be a year or more before a clear winner emerges and for the prices to come down. I would recommend not buying until the dust settles.
(Bob Seidel is a local computer consultant in the Southport - Oak Island area. You can visit his Website at www.bobseidel.com or e-mail questions or column ideas to him at bsc@bobseidel.com. For specific inquiries, please call Bob Seidel Consulting, LLC at 278-1007.)