Give Our Abilities Time

So I went to Costco two weekends ago and bought a Proview RX326 . Before, I had a Zenith 26" tube that I got as a gift when I moved into my old downtown apartment in 1998. Great TV, horrible monitor. I was trying to achieve what I've been looking to get with Media Center -- a real, usable PC in my living room. I had no issues with the display of live TV, recorded TV, TV that was, shall we say, recorded by others and generously distributed to me by many people at once in a, um, torrent, movies, and DVDs. Basically the 10' interface looked just fine to me. As a computer monitor, the Zenith displayed reasonably well at 640x480, but it turns out that the web designing community has not been designing to this resolution for some time. And the text was still too fuzzy at that resolution to try to do anything of significance with.

So my goal was to get a monitor that was readable from 5 feet away at some resolution in the 1024x768 or greater range. This would let me check email via OWA (work) or Gmail, let my wife use iTunes, let me see if my weekly flight to St. Louis is on time while drinking my coffee at 4:45 in the morning, and whatnot. I also thought I'd check out this "HDTV" fad that all the kids are raving about.

I knew that Media Center didn't support the HDTV the way most people receive it (through a cable box), it only supports OTA (Over The Air) or "clear QAM" (something that I don't know what it stands for but it means HD stations that are sent through your cable line unencrypted). Most people get a set-top box and plug that directly into their TV, and choose a different "source" other than Media Center to tune it, but for me, that would be a burden on the primary user of the TV (my wife) and thus I would be in trouble for spending all this money on something that makes the Media Center MORE of a pain in the ass than it is now. That would be bad. I try to avoid having my >$1000 purchases inconvenience my wife so that I can continue to make such purchases. So I have to get (preferably) clear QAM or OTA HDTV to work. More on that in part 2.

I had actually planned to buy the Akai Costco special from the week of 1/16 (sorry, no link -- I couldn't find any model information anywhere), which was a 27" with 1366x768 resolution and a built-in DVD (which I didn't need, I just wanted that size and resolution and it was $699 with coupon). When I got to the store, they were out of stock, and as I looked closely, I noticed that it only had VGA and component inputs, which was not optimal but I was willing to go forward with it. However, it wasn't available, and the Proview was the only reasonably priced LCD with either HDMI or DVI input.