Transcript
Everyone asks if I'm totally stoked about having a new Plasma HDTV. Fact of the matter is, it was a real pain in the ass. I wanted to document this story to maybe help out others considering taking the plunge into the world of high definition... First, while I am impulsive, I also have a lot of convictions. I've wanted a large, widescreen TV for some time - and nothing projection based would do. So I've been watching the prices of plasma and LCD (mainly plasma) for a couple of years now. My criteria were as follows: - Plasma (LCD has never impressed me for various reasons for watching film and high action stuff) - 42" or larger - Real HD (no EDTV) - Brand Name (no weird names you've never heard of before) - Purchase locally (I want to have somewhere to go if something goes wrong) - Native PC in (VGA) for my Whitebox - Must be under $2000 That being said, I had to wait a long time for all the stars to align and give me everything I wanted. July 4th, 2006 I figured there would be a sale on plasma TVs, and I was sure right. I took a tour of both Fry’s Electronics and Best Buy, and found a couple that met my specs. Now, I had to convince my wife it was time to jump on the plasma. She’d promised it to me, and I wasn’t going to let this one go! My sights were set on the Toshiba 42” Plasma (42HP66) http://www.tacp.toshiba.com/televisions/product.asp?model=42hp66 which retailed for about $2300 but was on sale for $1999. I priced around and did my research. At that point in time, this was the #6 best selling flat panel TV and reviews were very positive. Just to make sure my brain was still in the right place, I did more research on plasma technology and many of my fears about lifespan and other modern urban myths were dispelled. I was ready to buy. Buying the TV was easy, really. I asked a friend to bring his truck down to Fry’s and help me load it and then unload it at my house. I also asked him to help me move my 300 pound Sony Wega 36” to the ‘spare oom’ as my wife was pregnant and unable to assist in heavy lifting of that nature. I need to pause for a moment and explain how technology works in my house. It is like phasers you use on Borgs – set for a rotating modulation. When the best piece of technology in the house gets replaced, *IT* replaces the next lower form of technology, and so on. When I build myself a new computer, my wife gets my old one, and my kids get hers. The kid’s computer gets sold, donated, given away, whatever. So when the Wega was upgraded to the plasma, it got rotated to the spare room, the spare room TV
got moved to the master bedroom, and we found a home for the old TV that used to be there. In common-speak, I had to trash three FULL rooms to make this upgrade happen. Considering my wife JUST deep cleaned the house, this didn’t bode well with her. But, let’s not get ahead of ourselves … So, my friend brought the TV to my house, and we hauled back the Wega monster and stand. Naturally, I didn’t want to inconvenience my friend when he was helping me out, so I basically (safely) ripped out all the electronics from the TV base (I needed his help to put the TV back up on it in the spare room) and ran the base back there. This left the living room looking like the Island of Misfit electronics. Once we got the Wega back there on its stand, I sent my friend off with a heart-filled thanks, and went to work. Of course, the first thing to do – put up the wall mount. What you DON’T know about buying a new TV (at least I didn’t) was the ‘extra costs’ involved. The wall mount wasn’t cheap. I got an inexpensive tilt one for about $90. They go up to HUNDREDS of dollars, so plan ahead. Little did I know that this wall mount would be the first of MANY challenges I would face. It was Friday night, about 8pm at this time (I will be using time references frequently so you know what this effort entailed). The wall mount is required to be bolted to studs in your wall. No problem there; I own a stud finder. I found whereabouts on the wall I wanted the TV, found the two studs, used a level to make sure they were even, and drilled the holes. Oddly, one of the holes didn’t hit its mark; the stud wasn’t really there. Now, my stud finder is old, and it turned out that instead of being 16” OC, like studs SHOULD be, the first stud was about 14” OC. Terrific – the wall mount STARTED at 16”, and went up to like 22”. Therefore, it was impossible for me to mount the thing right where I wanted it. LOTS of drilling and dicking around later, I moved over one stud, got my holes level and drilled, then I was ready to hang the mount. By this time, it’s pushing a bit later in the evening – probably in the 9pm range, and I’m getting tired. But, the instructions that come with the wall mount are so … obscure … all pictures, no text. No way to compare the hardware to the list of materials. Some pictures were for mounting in concrete, some for wood studs – all a big mess. Finally, I figured it out and started putting in the screws into the wall with the mount plate. Now, they give you a handy dandy allen wrench to put these in with, which if you’ve ever put in 3” bolts with an allen wrench you know this to be evil. Eventually, I stripped the allen head and it occurred to me that the bolts had hex heads (I’m not very clever at this point in the night, if you haven’t figured it out) so after I had wrestled FAR too long with this, I broke out the ratchet set and drove those babies home. Amazingly enough, it went a LOT faster and my near bleeding hands thanked me ☺ … So, I have the mount on the wall – now it is time for the mounts for the TV. These looked far easier but the materials list was once again wanting. I did figure it out though, and put the mounts on. Then came time to see if my wife would be able to help me mount the TV on the wall, or if I was going to need to call my friend in the morning (it
was late by this time) to help. After testing the weight (about 70 pounds) my wife assured me we could do it. Before we mounted it though, we had to remove the stand. I guess I should have checked the stand attachment method BEFORE I put on the mounts. The mounts had to be removed before I could remove the 4 screws holding the stand on. Man, it never rains, but it pours. Let me tell you something about that mount kit. You would think that the mount on the wall and the mounts on the TV would have some play in them – you know, the hooks on the back of the TV would have a couple of inches to the right or left so you wouldn’t have to be DEAD ON when you put the TV up. Boy, was I wrong. There was NO clearance on the right or left of the hooks on the TV mount. Incredibly, our FIRST attempt, we got it up. I tell you what – nothing knots up your stomach like hanging a 70 pound, $2000 TV on your wall – and praying that it STAYS up there. Sure, I put in those screws … I knew it would hold, but still … you’re always wondering if you have any bad karma to attend to. Okay, so the TV is up on the wall, the living room is a complete mess and it is pretty damn late at this point. I throw power cables up and plug the cable in from the wall, just to see my work in action. My wife is standing over me, expectantly, waiting to be impressed. Gentlemen … here I’d like to take a break from the story and give you a nickel’s worth of free advice. Make sure your family members are properly educated on the difference between crisp, small CRTs and big, not-so crisp plasma TVs and the difference that the quality of the SOURCE of the video makes. Going from a Sony Wega CRT to a plasma – on BASIC CABLE – wasn’t the right move to make when trying to make a good first impression on my wife. “That picture looks terrible!” says my wife. And let’s be honest – it did look terrible. Low res basic cable shoved into a nice hi-res plasma just isn’t going to leave you breathless. At this point, my wife is too tired to stay up, and heads to be, probably thinking her husband just got cheated out of $2000. I assured her on the way to the bedroom that when I picked up the HD Cable box tomorrow, she would see the light. Before turning in myself, I started making a shopping list of all the cables I was going to need to pick up, based on my configuration. My components consisted of a Gamecube, VCR, PC Whitebox, DVD player, HD Cablebox, and my receiver. I called Cox Cable’s tech support to find out if their cable boxes supported HDMI. I was assured it did, however due to the nature of HDMI and various types of TVs, they wouldn’t support it; they expected you to use component video. Fine, I’ll try HDMI, if that doesn’t savvy, I’ll go back to component. By now, we’re looking at about 1:30am or so, and I needed to crash.
About 8:30am, my body decided it was time to get up and go get the HD Cablebox (like being a kid at Christmas time). So, I drove to Cox’s center, figuring “the early bird gets the worm” and I’d be in and out in no time. BUZZZZZ! Wrong answer. I took number 21 from the Ticket-o-thon and saw they were serving #8 … Sigh … and me without my Nintendo DS. An hour later, I was the proud owner of an HD Cablebox. Now it was time to go cable shopping! Smart thing, I checked the back of the cablebox to make SURE it was HDMI. Glad I did – it wasn’t HDMI, it was DVI. A nice connection, but NOT quite HDMI. That would change my list a bit. Back to Fry’s Electronics, I broke out my list. A component cable for the PS2 (at this point, I thought I would put the PS2 in the living room), a couple component cables for the DVD and possibly the cablebox. A couple of optical cables for audio. An HQ RCA plug for digital audio – oh, and what is this? DVI to HDMI cable! Whoa! Cool. What???!!! FIFTY BUCKS!??? I felt a sharp stabbing pain in my butt, but decided, I blew the load on the TV, I might as well do it right with the cables. Folks, be sure to budget for cables. I left with ‘medium grade’ cables, and spent $180. Time to go home and put the mess together … it is now about 1pm. I stopped to get my family some lunch (figured they would appreciate it). I’m a considerate husband and father. Checked the mail – my replacement copy of Monsters Inc. showed up, so I figured that was a hint as to what we would break in the TV with. First, I wanted to see the PS2 on the TV, so I tried that first. During the moving around, I must’ve dislodged one of the mod chip wires, because it wasn’t booting at all. Downer. So, it came out of the entertainment center, and the Gamecube went in. Next up, HD Cable. I was ready to show my wife that we did good. Optical out to the receiver, DVI to HDMI to the TV. Great … power up and find out I have to call a 1800 number to “activate the box”. I call the automated service and find out it could take “up to two hours” to activate. My wife was pissed. Fine, whatever. We’ll move on to the DVD. For the DVD, RCA digital out to the receiver, component video to the TV. Pirates of the Carribean was in the player, so I fired it up. Hmmm… The screen was bluish … I checked all the cables – everything was hooked up right. Puzzled, I tried Super Video to the TV. Worked fine. Hmmmm. I dinked with it, and realized that the DVD player itself had to be changed to COMPONENT out vice SVIDEO out. Very interesting. Once done, I was treated with a GREAT picture. The cable still isn’t working, so I call a human that gets me online right away (should have called them first). Strangely enough, the channels still look like crap. So I look
around to find out what might be going on. Turns out that the HD channels are 700+, and the rest of the channels are straight cable (no better than before). So, we start looking at the HD channels. Trust me on this – show off DiscoveryHD first! Dinosaur Planet rules in HD. Anyway, time to run a movie. To soothe the family, I put in Monsters Inc and was treated to a visual treat that only plasma can provide. Toward the end of the movie, my wife had to get ready for her bi-weekly scrapbooking party. Just as she was getting ready to leave, the receiver turned itself off! What the hell? I turned it back on, only to have it go out again, a few minutes later. Finally, I left it off, and we watched with no sound. My wife comes out to leave and says, “where is the sound?” I explained that the receiver kept shutting off and I didn’t know why. Told her I would probably have to replace it. Sigh. So, back to Fry’s I go, ready to buy another receiver. I ask for assistance (audio isn’t my strong suit) and end up leaving with a decent $200 Onkyo receiver. I also picked up a SVideo cable for the Gamecube (kthx$34). It is about 6pm at this time. I rip the Kenwood out of the entertainment center, and start hooking up the Onkyo. When I got to the subwoofer wires, I realized there was no place to put them! The only think labeled subwoofer was an RCA jack. Confused, a little pissed, and really tired – I boxed it back up, took it back to Fry’s, did the return mumbo jumbo, and went to find another receiver. This time, I turned every single one of them around – none of them had a subwoofer wire connection. Puzzled, I found a store clerk who educated me on passive vs. powered subwoofers. My choices? Buy a ‘home theater’ kit, throw away the speakers, and use THAT receiver at home (for $250) or, buy a regular receiver and a $100 powered subwoofer. Knowing full well that either way I went, I was going to get smacked around at home, I opted to go the better route. As the dude was writing up my paperwork, I bitched about my receiver at home, telling him what it was doing. He says to me “Sounds like your receiver is shutting itself off to protect itself”. “Against what?” I ask. Turns out that receivers will shut themselves off if there are shorts in the speaker system (I told you, this isn’t my forte). Realizing that I HAD spliced some speaker wire, I began to think that I must’ve forgotten to tape up the leads. I told the guy to ring me up anyway – I’d leave the stuff in the car, and see if I could hunt down the short. I got home – this puts me in the 8pm range now. I’ve had this TV for 24 hours and haven’t had time to really watch anything. I put the Kenwood back together, fixed my un-taped splice, and threw in Mrs. Doubtfire, absolutely SURE I was going to sit down and watch it. I played on the computer a few minutes, then decided I owed it to my understanding wife to clean the living room up and put everything back where it should be. I did the right
thing, wrapped all my newly-freed wires and cables into nice Velcro tiewraps, picked up all the mess, blah blah. This put me to about 11pm. I figure this would be a good time to test all the equipment again and start making some documentation for my wife so she knows how to align everything for cable, DVD, etc. As I flip through my inputs, the cable doesn’t come up. Interesting. The box appears to be working, but I ain’t got no video. So, being the highly skilled technician that I am, I reach around to make sure the dang thing is plugged in. Ah! The DVI plug is out – probably when I moved things around. Plugged it back in and I’m greeted with a very evil message: Copyright Protection Error: DVI plug has been disabled. What the hell!?? I unplug the box to reboot it, and it won’t reboot. It is now 12:15am, and I’m calling Cox to reset my box. It doesn’t appear to be working. I’m at wit’s end. The guy basically tells me to change to component cables, because they don’t technically support HDMI, and he feels that’s gotta be the problem. I tell the dude it was working all day. I tell him of the error message, etc. So, I’m finally resigned to changing to component. As I pull the cable box around to get to the back the cable suddenly kicks on! I’m like, “whoa, we got TV” and he’s like “Great!”. I shift the cable box back into position, BAM! – it goes out again. So I tell the guy that it must be on my end, that I apparently have a short here somewhere. He wishes me luck and I start trying to find the short. After a bunch of time dicking with it, I find out that the COAX (WTF????) has a short in it about 3 or 4 inches from the plug! This is the cable company’s own “high grade” cabling. I replace the segment and I’m back in business. The wife wants to go to bed at this point, so again – I’m still not watching my new TV. Sunday morning, we’re up super early to go see the new Pirates of the Carribean flick which is hella long. We get home about 2pm or so. My wife takes a nap, I try to get caught up on the computer – come about 4pm, I’m so tired, I crawl into bed for a nap myself. Sleep til like 7pm. Now I get to play a little. I start going through each input and adjusting color, contrast and the whole bit – trying to get the best picture possible. Needless to say, with a work day the next day, I didn’t stay up too late playing. Now … It’s been a week since I got my HDTV and I’ve had a chance to properly evaluate everything and give you my thoughts on the matter proper. First, I’m still friggin’ amazed that I have a TV that hangs on the wall. I have a small house anyway, and having the TV take up ZERO footprint on my living room floor is nothing short of miraculous. Second, the power of HDTV comes from the source. In many ways, it is INFERIOR to normal definition CRT displays – and you HAVE to be ready for that. You may think that “digital cable” alone should look incredible on your new plasma, but the fact is, it just DOESN’T. In fact, it looks fairly bad. My fair warning to you is; if you don’t plan
on watching more HD/higher def digital content than standard cable TV, be prepared to take a step DOWN from what you have now. Sure, it’s 42” in size, but the bigger it is, the more stretching it has to do, and the worse it looks. Make no mistake – there is a reason Nintendo didn’t elect to make the new Wii console HD; the customer base just isn’t there. Our cable company has like 30 HDTV channels, and 90% of the time, most of them are playing NON-HD content, which means they look SLIGHTLY better on the HD channel than on the digital cable channel, but not much. If the source ain’t high definition, the feed ain’t high definition. If you’re doing a whitebox (media PC scenario) and you have tons of high quality digital stuff on there to playback, you’re going to just LOVE your new TV. Family Guy has never looked better. Even my Knight Rider DVD rips (Xvids) look VERY VERY good on the new TV. Suffice to say, real HDTV programming looks fantastic – especially the DiscoveryHD channel. For me, it was $4 more a month, an hour of hell at the cable company getting a new cable box. As a bonus, I get all my local HD channels too. Mario Party 7 owns on my plasma … ALLLL RIIIIGHT … Finally, you’ve been wondering why you cared so much about TRUE ANAMORPHIC DVDs, your new HDTV will vindicate your dedication to proper aspect ratio and anamorphic transfers. Not only does your new widescreen TV look fantastic with a nice high bitrate quality DVD, but of course, having a TV in the proper aspect ration for theatrical viewing is the total bomb. Am I pleased with my purchase? Damn straight. But, I’ve learned a lot about the technology and the realism of HDTV’s limited market penetration and only specialized benefit to those that can take advantage of it.
