Oh My God! It’s Huge!

I finally went ahead and bought myself a new telly this week but I have come to the conclusion that it is completely ridiculous. The TV is nice enough and I did research the thing quite well. I was unsure of what size to get so I referred to several websites which gave an idea of what sort of TV size to get for a given viewing distance. Most of these may have well as said “get a bloody huge one”. For my 4.3 metre viewing distance they indicated anything from 46” through 50” and 55” up to about 105” – I thought this last one was confusing inches with centimetres but it was an American author so I am just assuming that they were slightly potty. I thought I would err on the side of caution (and thrift) by going for the lower end of these figures and having been really impressed with a Samsung set (UE46D5000) a couple of months ago I went back down to Comet for a second look – only to be told that they had stopped stocking it as it was “so 2011”. Bugger! Anyway, I had a search online and found it was still available via the Interweb but the cheapest retailer had priced it at £50 more than the next model up in the range (UE46D5520 - which comes with something called SMART TV) so I went for the cheaper (and higher spec) model instead. It turns out this must have been a pricing mistake as they had reversed the prices the next day, but the retailer shipped it at the original price – much to their credit.

Anyway, it arrived on Wednesday. The box was huge but it did, at least, weigh significantly less than my old CRT set which was made out of lead or uranium or something. We unpacked it and carefully put the stand together. It just about fits in the space at the end of the room. When switched off it is a jet black monolith sitting ominously at the end of the room like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey or an iPhone that is actually designed for my crappy eyesight. It’s actually rather intimidating. Anyway, I connected the aerial cable and switched it on. After a few minutes configuration and tuning it burst into life and I have to say the picture is spectacular. It comes with Freeview HD built in and this is the first time I’ve actually had an HD device in the house. David Attenborough’s latest series was on BBC One HD which really shows the technology at its best. Just to show Nina how HD differs from SD I switched it over to the standard BBC One – it also looked pretty good. In fact, it takes a keen eye to spot the improvement in HD and this is what appealed to me in the shop: the up-scaling is fantastic and even some older recordings look good, but it becomes very obvious that we are watching standard Freeview on some channels. The BBC tend to broadcast at a very high bit-rate but when we watched some of the smaller digital channels it shows up the difference quite easily. We saw The Big Bang Theory on E4+1 and it was obvious that the definition was lower. It is possible to see this even on my old 32” CRT but when the picture is blown up by 50%, with nearly twice the pixels to play with, the difference is quite marked.

This was all going well until I connected the AV amp to the TV via component. Previously I had used S-Video connections to the CRT telly but these are very much out of vogue and the only analogue connections available are composite and component. I connected the component to the TV and immediately noticed that the picture was haywire – everything looked green. After some experimentation I discovered that the TV will not handle the amp’s component output and even the composite output looked terrible. I ended up connecting the amp to the SCART socket via the composite cable and this was much better. It looks reasonably OK but it is obvious that the picture is still not as sharp as it could be and it is a bit of a fly in the ointment. I will be able to get around this when I replace the DVD, PVR and satellite receivers with HDMI outputting units but it is rather disappointing. I think one of the advantages of CRT was that it was natively analogue rather than having to convert it to digital and I suppose this is how they suck you in: once the format changes it pushes the consumer down the path to upgrade everything at once.

I mentioned that the set came with SMART TV and this is Samsung’s method of implementing Internet TV. It includes an “app” store whereby connections to services like iPlayer, Youtube and BlinkBox can be downloaded as well as streaming for LoveFilm. Fortunately, I wired in an Ethernet socket when I redecorated the room so I was able to connect this. It’s quite impressive. We started off by searching free TV episodes on Blinkbox. This works quite well but they have adverts every 10 minutes or so (which is fair enough on a free service). It does seem to stutter a little whilst buffering to begin with but it soon settled down and ran through quite happily. And this is where I think it becomes completely ridiculous as, having bought this state of the art technology, what is the first thing that we watched on it: The Web Planet, an episode of Doctor Who from 1965 – made in black and white and originally broadcast in the same 405 line VHF system that the BBC had been using since 1936 (BBC One has just marked its 75^th birthday). At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter how good the hardware is, it is the content that matters.

So that’s it, I have finally replaced the old TV after a long line of excuses: LCD not looking as good, being broke, not risking small children breaking it, being broke, not wanting a flat screen TV that the cat couldn’t sleep on, being broke, moving house as a good excuse for being broke, redecorating the house, being broke because of the dog’s vet bills and probably dithering a bit as to what I actually wanted. The reception from the rest of the house is a bit mixed. Nina wants to know if we can still watch German TV, Raymond is obsessed about the internet thing and Jake burst into tears because it is big and scary. As for me, I’m just going to read a book tonight: there’s nothing much on TV.