Mashing buttons since 1984
I don’t know about you, but I am enjoying the best show on television right now with my new sub $1000 47″ 1080p HDTV.
I love the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl (cheap TVs), All those stories you’re hearing of Circuit City liquidating stuff fast? Yeah, 10% off right now, and it’s still expensive. Pass.
I love Sam’s Club.
You want to get your peace-loving GTA IV on. She wants to violently throw blue shells at anthropomorphic kart riders. Who wins out? If you’ve got a big enough widescreen with POP (Picture-out-picture), you both do!
via Perfectance’s Flickr stream
So who gets the surround sound?
I’ve finally uploaded pictures of the unboxing of my new 50″ Samsung DLP HDTV. (For those interested, here’s a link to my TV on Samsung’s website) In all honesty, my pictures don’t really do justice to this TV. It is, quite simply, a beautiful thing that can not be captured by a camera and distilled into bits and bytes. It needs to be experienced. But since I can’t have you all over, pictures will have to do.
Hit the jump for the rest of the pictures:
[Read more…] about The unboxing of the Samsung
I’m back and I’m ready to take on 2007 with renewed gusto. I hope everyone is having a good holiday weekend and that everyone’s New Year’s Day is going good.
I had a pretty good, albeit hectic, Christmas Holiday. It was nice to see the extended family. We had family from out-of-town, so the little buttonMashers got to see their cousin and aunts and uncles. We spent most of the week with them, at Mrs. buttonMasher’s parent’s house. The brother-in-law is a gamer and we spent most of the week playing Fight Night 3 (a great game with easy Achievement Points, BTW). It was painful playing it on a 21″ TV, but it beats no gaming at all. We also saw some movies. The new Bond movie was excellent and the new Rocky movie was suprisingly good.
Santa was good to me, bringing everything I asked for (except for the sound system, still looking for that). I haven’t had a chance to play any of my new games yet, as I’ve been busy with other things.
Like I mentioned earlier, my new TV arrived just as we were getting ready to head out of town for the holidays. We came home on Saturday, picked up a nice TV stand and set up my new Samsung TV. (I’ll be posting some pictures later). I picked up some HDTV rabbit ears, since my cable package is the basic, non-digital package. For some reason, however, I’m picking up a few of the broadcast HD signals over the cable. It’s weird. Anyway, my current cable provider, Time Warner, doesn’t offer all the broadcast channels in high-def. The two channels they don’t offer are the ones I actually want so I’m switching companies to WOW! Cable. I’m getting their Digital Package, with all their HD offerings. It comes on Wednesday, I can’t wait. Even though I’m only getting a few channels in HD right now, I can already see 2007 is going to be a High Definition year for me. I’m currently watching a Bowl game (WVU vs. GT) instead of the other games, because it’s coming in HD and the others aren’t. I can’t believe how good it looks on this TV.
And the 360? Wow. That’s all I can say right now. WOW! I played some Dead Rising and Burnout Revenge so far in HD and it took me a few minutes to pick my jaw up off the floor. It’s that good.
So I hope everyone’s having a good holiday season. I’m back in the saddle with lots of plans for blogging this year. I appreciate everyone who’s been reading and commenting. I hope 2007 is another great year for everyone. I’m going to play some games in HD.
How is getting a new TV like getting kicked in the junk? When it shows up mere hours before you’re getting ready to head home for the holidays. And you were planning on being gone for eight days.
Crap! Looks like I’ll be cutting our visit a few hours short next Saturday so I can get home in time to pick up my new TV stand. I’m thinking about picking this one up.
More pictures to follow. Like most everyone else, I’ll be pretty busy with the holidays, but I’m hoping to find some time to get a little blogging in. Nevertheless, I wanted to wish everyone a Happy Holidays.
I did it! After hemming and hawing for the better part of six months, I have finally taken the plunge and decided to enter the High-Definition TV era. I had my eye on a few TVs, but I kept coming back to the Samsung brand. The cost of LCD and Plasma were a little out of my price for the size I wanted, so I went with a DLP television. After reading various home theater forums, magazines, reviews, and talking with friends, I decided on the Samsung HL-S5088W, a 50 inch DLP.
We belong to a “wholesale club” (not Sam’s or Costco) so I got a tremendous price on it. Problem is, it could take up to six weeks to arrive. A bit of a pain, but, for the price, I can wait. I’m secretly hoping it shows up before January 8th, as there’s a little college football game that I’d love to see in high-def. Plus, I’ve heard 24, Lost and a host of other programming looks pretty good in HD. Not to mention the 360 in glorious, glorious 1080p.
I’m a little worried about having the little buttonMashers running around, abusing it. My Sony TV has been covered with little fingerprints for about three years now, so I’m not hopeful. We’ll just have to teach them to respect daddy’s new toy. I don’t break their stuff, they don’t break mine. Seems simple enough.
So I’m excited about joining the HD generation. I’d love to hear what kind of set-ups you guys have (HD or not). If you have any experiences (good or bad) with Samsung DLPs, I’d love to hear them. I’ll definitely be posting the unboxing, whenever it arrives. I’m as giddy as a ten year old on Christmas eve.
Thanks to everyone who sent me suggestions and comments on my request for HDTV advice. The over-whelming suggestion was to go with a wide-screen LCD monitor. While I initially had my reservations about the idea, I must say I was misguided. Read on for what was purchased, along with a quick review…
[Read more…] about HDTV advice follow-up
Buttonmashing friend Bobster asked me for advice on getting a small HDTV that he can use as a dedicated Xbox 360 display. He wanted to keep it under $400 and wanted at least above average image quality. He asked me if I had any suggestions.
I’ve been researching HDTVs for a while now, but I’ve been looking at larger TVs, out of the range Bobster is looking at. Right off the bat I would recommend a Samsung LCD. I think a 23″ Samsung LCD (like this one) would fit the bill perfectly, but the cheapest I found was $569 at Amazon.com. I found this 23″ LCD TV by Olevia on sale locally at HHGregg for $399. I’ve heard good things about Olevia TVs and feel confident that it would be a solid 360 display.
But before I give Bobster my final recommendations, I wanted to ask my fellow Buttonmashers if they have any recommendations or experiences with HDTVs that fall in this price range (or experience with Oleviea TVs).
Any suggestions or comments are greatly appreciated.