DISQUS

Life is grand: HDTV, first take

  • James Corbett · 2 years ago
    Looking forward to your updates on your HDTV adventures Paul. I've been asking a few newbie questions on the boards.ie forums regarding availability of FTA HD and unfortunately it seems like it's still limited to the BBC trial channel. And the HD receivers are still rather expensive. Some commentators believe that should change quickly though.
  • kav · 2 years ago
    Paul, just a quick question as you've obviously done your homework on this. I'm looking at getting either a 32" or 37" HDTV. My budget's fixed, so obviously I'd be getting a slightly inferior product if I went for the bigger screen. So, would you recommend investing my cash in getting a better quality, but smaller screen, or is there so little difference between them that I could just splash out on the bigger one?
  • James Corbett · 2 years ago
    Kav, hope you don't mind if I jump in here but I'll refer you to the following chart which demonstrates that viewing distance and resolutions are important considerations -

    http://wirelessdigest.typepad.com/.shared/image...
  • Paul Watson · 2 years ago
    Thanks James, you said what I was going to say. I looked at the 32", 37" and 40" models and while the 40" is very impressive it would be unwatchable in my living room as the room just isn't big enough. 32" is about right, 37" would probably be too big too.

    So figure out which room the TV is going in, choose the right size for that and then you can look at price/quality differences.

    After that I'd say go for quality over quantity. 40 inches of fuzz is far worse than 30 inches of clarity.
  • Jason Madigan · 2 years ago
    I've been meaning to buy a 40"+ monstrosity for quite some time now, but Irish retailers seem to be incredibly slow (perhaps understandably so) at getting full HD 1080p sets in stock. Don't get me wrong, 720p/1080i is a huge step up from SDTV's, but since I use my Xbox 360 a lot it'd be great to view things at 1920 x 1080.

    As for hooking your Macbook Pro up to an HDTV with HDMI, DVI, unlike HDMI doesn't carry audio, just video so if you want sound you'll probably need to pump out from the line-out on the MBP via RCA or something.