Mos Def High Def
Recently I pulled the trigger on a 40 inch Sony Bravia LCD of the X Series persuasion, which immediately paints me as a bit of a tosser. In my defence I'd like to point out that most of my spare time is spent stretched out on a yoga mat in the lounge, watching television. This makes a $3000 HDTV a bit less of a total wank, and more of a productive and useful item for a chap struggling with long term lower back pain. That said, as soon as I had it set up... jeepers. If this television was magically transmuted into heroin and appeared in the movie Pulp Fiction, it would be Choco from the heart mountains of Germany. It's 500 a gram, but when you shoot it you will know were that extra money went. I regularly find myself engrossed in ridiculous stuff like championships bowls, Lateline or random toothbrush ads because they just look so goddamn fantastic.
With just the television alone, we pick up free-to-air HDTV from the standard channels like Nine, Seven and Ten through a standard aerial. All those HD and digital channels were detected automatically during the TV's setup, which was nice. Content-wise, it's very nice to catch random shows like CSI: Miami in sexalicious HD, but my real focus is the upcoming Tri-Nations rugby tests. The Olympics will also look very good, although I don't know how many events I'm really keen to watch. I am informed that the female gymnastics and female diving are excellent viewing in HD.
I have my old media laptop hooked up to the Bravia via VGA and a stereo cable. This runs at 1024 x 768, which isn't quite as good as 720p (1280 x 720) but looks a crapload better than what we used to run for the old television - 800 x 600 over a cruddy s-video cable. Downloaded video now looks very good, and the text on the Windows desktop is very readable. I plan on putting together a media PC sometime in the future to run at true 1080p over HDMI, but for now the media laptop works just fine.
To make the most of the television, I'm hoping to get my hands on a free Playstation 3 through Sony's Bravia PS3 promotion. They are giving away 35,000 PS3s (12,199 at the time of this writing) to clever people (read: me) who purchase a Bravia Full HD LCD TV during the month of July. I've sent my details in and received an initial approval, but I won't count my chickens until I actually have the PS3 all hooked up and I'm watching Planet Earth in Blu-ray and going oooooh a lot. It will also be great to finally get my hands on a current generation gaming console, and get back into gaming, albeit from a horizontal position. Cross fingers.