HDTV Thoughts
Getting my tiptoes wet in the market for a small HDTV, I realize (despite my need to get completely tired enough to go to sleep) that this whole 480p, 720p, 1080i/p situation has completely detached itself from reality and become a big, steaming mess of junk.
I find myself wondering, “Will there be a 1080p 27 inch LCD display in the near future?” Well, from my reading it looks like this question is only answered by trade show fodder, in which Sony is debuting an OLED (that’s “O” for organic in this crazy reality) that can pull off this feat.
I realize that BluRay, HD-DVD, and friends are a’coming, and I will no doubt at some point in time be dragged unconscious up to a cash register with some cheap model of a 1080p-blasting device, and some nice employee will carry it out to my spaceship towed by faerie dust and dreams.
I also envision that said device will, when I come to, be capable of performing a downscaling operation to bring its resolution down to the mesosphere (which a Wikipedia check reveals is actually above the stratosphere, which in turn breaks my allusion to the idiom, so please s/stratosphere/exosphere for the regex folks out there) of 720p, where I will gladly sit, warming my soft green couch with tan accent pillows with my soft rosy-red, split-cushioned, fully-attached butt.
In sum, I don’t need 1080p, especially at 27”. Because 27” at 720p is going to look quite a bit like a computer monitor with HDMI inputs by the time 1080p is stealing everybody’s lunch money.
1080i bugs me like anything you double and then take half of. Or anything you halve and take double of. Depending on the case. Like the super-strength dish soap that comes in the tiny little bottle. 1080i is, from my perspective, a big number followed by an embarrassing letter.
I don’t know. It shouldn’t take this much effort to shop for something you shouldn’t care nearly as much about as people tend to do.