Widescreen time

After 6 years of looking at my Toshiba 19″ 4:3 ratio CRT TV, we finally bought a new TV this week – a Sharp Aquos 32″ LCD TV. Certainly not cheap, but thanks to a 20% points discount it made us finally put up and buy a new one – and it was worth every hard earned yen!

It’s a beautiful screen, takes up less space, and is nicer to look at. But forget that – DVDs look fantastic on it – we watched The Matrix on it tonight, but that film isn’t exactly known for it’s colour scheme, so we put on Fellowship of the Ring, and quite frankly it looks like a different film – the picture was just amazing. Normal TV channels looked great too, both from analogue and digital transmissions, with the latter obviously looking much cleaner.

There are hundreds of settings and options to play with on the bilingual menu system, but we found the auto defaults were usually good enough. I also played SSX3 on my Playstation 2, and it looked amazing, but unfortunately, at that size, the PS2 resolution starts to show.

One pleasant and somewhat unexpected result is that the built-in speaker system is easily as good as my cheap Sony mini-system I usually use, maybe even clearer, so I might be able to save some cables there. Another saver is that since the TV has 4 inputs, I wont need the switch box I had before which should simplify everything!

On the whole, expensive, but definitely worth it, especially for me coming from such a low spec. level to this. All I have to do now is re-watch all my DVDs again!