Digital Slob
Digital Slob
A future filled with
HDTV is as inescapable
as nose hairsRight now, you could be watching the CBS sitcom "The King of Queens" in high definition on a 65-inch Mitsubishi WS-65909 projection TV with a 16:9 aspect ratio, MicroFine Phosphor CRTs, QuadField Focus, Motion-Adaptive 3-D/Y 480-Line Comb Filters, High-Speed Velocity Scan Modulation and picture-in-picture capability.
So, why aren't you?
Certainly, seeing actor Jerry Stiller's comic genius right down to his nose hairs, or similar details from a handful of other shows now broadcast in HDTV, is worth the $4,000 price tag on the WS-65909.
Granted, it would be cheaper to fly to Hollywood and stare up Stiller's nose in person (depending on what kind of tip you'd give him for the privilege), but only a few of us not under 24-hour surveillance like the show that much.
It's true that $4,000 could make anyone pause, but here's a tip: That college fund that's just sitting there for your kids is really counterproductive as a parenting tool, if you think about it. It tells your offspring, "In case you never crack a book and can't throw a ball to save your life, we stand ready to pay through the nose for you to stumble into a scholarship-free, achievement-free education."
So maybe you should buy the WS-65909 and let your kids watch you write the check from the account set up in their name. It'll build their character.
Then again -- considering I'm single with no kids, about to turn 35 and paid off my college loans a half-hour ago -- maybe not.
For now, it seems, most of us must wrestle with HDTV envy, walking the streets sullen, haunted by the idea that somewhere, somehow, someone can see the light through more pixels than we can.
But it's not like we don't have plenty else to obsess about -- take your pick: estranged relatives, bills, wars, blood-test results after impromptu Caribbean vacations. Plenty.
Yet now these "HDTV sightings" are piling on even more anxiety, making us long for a simpler time when TV only cost us sleep if Charro was the last guest on Johnny Carson.
Perhaps we can all take comfort in Robert Louis Stevenson's rhetorical phrase, "Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?" Thankfully, even in the Digital Age, the answer is still heavily implied in the question.
Some of our dads are still paying off the second mortgage that financed the family's first color TV in the '60s, all just to glimpse the green carpet that passed for grass on "Bonanza."
The majority of households were denied such a pleasure until prices came down in the '70s, only to realize that "Barnaby Jones" was no more lifelike in color than in black and white.
When the federales spout things like, "We don't know when it's coming, or where or how, but it's coming," they could just as easily be talking about HDTV as al-Qaida.
It's easier to get the straight dope on Area 51 than the coming HDTV wave. But it seems in a few years we'll either be buying TVs with HD tuners (that'll add about $250 to the price), or we'll be stealing them. Once all tuners transition to HDTV, starting in 2007 via Federal Communications Commission mandate, the only other options will be charades and shadow puppets, so Digital Slobs should start applying for new lines of credit now or start learning how to pick a lock.
The FCC and "the industry" just love to slow-dance to their favorite tune, "HDTV standards," so until the red-tape music stops we'll just have to stay receptive to our current reception. But someday we may look back on this period as the waning days of the quaint, Golden Age of nose-hairless TV.
Curt Brandao is the Star-Bulletin's
production editor. Reach him at
at: cbrandao@starbulletin.com