Mark Morford, Gen X columinst for SFGate.com and my geeky spiritual brother, has recently had a very similar experience to mine with regards to making the HDTV plunge. And he wrote about it, of course:
So why I felt the need to sell my perfectly good lump of a TV to a former housemate and then swallow the red pill and sink a small mountain of cash into an enormous, glistening 46" Samsung LCD that weighs almost as much as my ex-girlfriend and blocks out the sun and will likely be obsolete by the time President Obama gives his first State of the Union address (prediction: optimistic, but overall, still pretty screwed) in order that I may be able to see -- what now? NASCAR? "Grey's Anatomy?" Reruns of "Scrubs" on WGN? -- from deep space and still not miss any major plot points, is a bit beyond me.
Much more:
As I burned away countless precious hours of my life researching all the rather silly details of this ridiculous and gorgeous new toy, I found a remarkable all-American truism to be constantly jackhammered into the collective consciousness: these days, the vast majority of our gadgets and our products and our high-end swag are designed to be just wildly overcapable, packed with functions and features and materials well beyond what we will ever need, or care to need, or even want to care to think to desire to need. And what's more, that's exactly how we like it.
And more:
What's more, did my eye, my brain, my soul, my aura, my qi and my kundalini actually give a flying pixel about contrast ratios when I had that old Toshiba? Or the crappy old 13" color set I had in college before that? But now I'm supposed to add these new and lovingly pointless terms to the huge and unstable list of facts and details and karmic minutiae I have to remember to care about? Well, all right. But there goes the space I was saving for love and hope and the location of my missing sunglasses.
I know Morford is exaggerating for effect, but I disagree with him just a smidge. I’m madly in love with my new Toshiba Regza piece of technological gorgeousness, and even though I had some qualms about spending so much money at first, I don’t regret it at all now. I’m madly in love with this TV... but fortunately love is not a zero-sum game, and I have not found that my capacity to be a loving human being -- toward, you know, other human beings, as opposed to technology -- is at all impacted.
In fact, I’m moved to host a movie-watching party and invite all my friends over so that I can share their wonderful company, and so that I can share the gloriousness that is HDTV and an upconverting DVD player, too. That’s being social and personable and human and all, right?
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