By February 2009, television is going totally digital. In preparation for this, my dear old dad bought a high definition television - HDTV.
Granted, only a few stations come in HDTV, but there is a harsh, stark difference from regular television. The hype is that the picture and sound are a lot better. If you think people with glowing eyes, teeth and grey hair is better than the fuzzy, more muted version, then HDTV is for you. The picture is unreal, overly vivid, and the colors scream louder than AC-DC.
Oh sure, we can read the text a lot better - and that is its only improvement, imo. But when you look around your living room and then at the HDTV, it's as if Walt Disney, Andy Warhol and Timothy Leary took an acid trip to the sun. The colors radiate, irritate, and distract from the film. It's like permanently watching TV in phosphorescence. It sucks.
The intensity of the colors makes the picture vivid from 50 feet away. I kid you not. How can this possibly be anything but harmful to our eyes? I'm thinking we might benefit by putting a black screen over the 67-inch HDTV - it'll mute the colors to a more realistic hue.
I mean, I like red fine. But I like mauve, too. I like the muted colors of the Painted Desert. And while the ocean's sparkling waves on a bright sunny day are pretty, they have nothing on the misty verdent variations of a mature rainforest.
Don't be the first on your block to buy HDTV. Wait until they fix the color intensity.
