A New Addiction

By Glenn Farr

    In spite of my general addiction to gadgets, I waited a long time to buy my first DVD player. The units remained fairly expensive during the first few years after they were launched in the late ‘90s and I didn’t find my price point for a while. In the meantime, I had discovered Super VHS and thought it looked mighty fine, thank you very much.
    But in 2002, I had just moved into a new house and was reconfiguring my audio/video system to fit my new living space and I thought, “Maybe it’s time.” I searched on the Internet until I found a loaded JVC unit that would have cost me almost $70 more in any of the local electronics stores and I made one of my first online purchases. (By researching and buying it online, I simultaneously engaged in two technologies that were new to me. Before then, the Internet to me was primarily a venue for exchanging e-mail and hanging out in chat rooms. These days, it is my main shopping mall.)
    One look at a DVD, even on the standard definition TV I had at the time, was enough to sell me on the medium for good. My Super VHS VCR immediately began to languish. It’s still in the rack, but it has rarely sprung to life in six years.
    As everyone knows by now, the picture quality, convenience of scene access and additional features that can be offered by DVDs are light years ahead of the VHS experience. And most important of all, you never have to “be kind—rewind.” (Remember when a video rental store would charge you $1 for not rewinding tapes when you returned them?)
    DVDs and I settled into a comfortable relationship, one I was certain would last for years.
    That is, until the advent of HDTV.
    When I first began to hear about high definition television, I didn’t pay it much attention. Flat screen TVs were selling for nearly $20,000 and I figured if it cost as much as my car, I wasn’t ready to know about it, much less buy into it.
    A little over two years ago, my perspective began to shift. My satellite provider began to include pamphlets about its new tier of high definition channels in my monthly billing statements.
    I began to read them.
    For the past eight years, I’ve had an on-again, off-again relationship with DISH Network. The status of that relationship has depended on where I lived at a given time and how many trees might potentially block the satellite signal path. In the spring of 2006, the relationship was definitely on; DISH had acquired the recently defunct VOOM HD Network and, after combining its exotic niche channels with some other early national HD channels, then offered more high definition programming than any other pay TV provider.
    And they wanted to share their visual feast with me—for only $20 a month more.
    At the time, I had a monster of a standard definition television stationed in one of those built-in cubbies over my fireplace. A 36-inch flat-screen CRT, it weight nearly 200 lbs. and wasn’t going anywhere. And due to its two-inch-thick-glass, it made standard definition satellite TV look so wet and lustrous several of my friends accused me of already having HDTV—and lying about it.
    “I’ll wait,” I repeatedly told myself. “The TV I have is quite nice.”
    Nevertheless, I began to haunt the big box stores at lunch, lusting after flat screens, absorbing all the information I could about plasmas and LCDs and which gave the best picture and which cost more, etc. At the time, even the smallest of these models was cost prohibitive.
    Then, one day late in May of 2006, during my lunch hour, I actually allowed a big box store salesman talk to me about a 26-inch Sharp LCD flat panel I happened to be standing near. To this day, I’m still not quite sure how it happened. But an hour later, I had bought it, taken it home, set it up and returned to work for the day with a guilty secret. (The feat WAS manageable within an hour because the store and my home are quite close to the NACA Office.)
    Within a few days, a satellite installer was at my door to upgrade my dish so I could receive and translate the HDTV signals that were already beaming down onto my house. (But I didn’t tell anyone I had taken the HDTV plunge for nearly a month because I had sworn to several friends I wouldn’t be spending any more money on gadgets for a while.)
    Now, a couple years later, I and many others know all about how some satellite HD signals are compressed and may not truly be high-def by the time they hit our flat screen pixels.
    No matter.
    What I saw when satellite guy hooked me up was truly remarkable, better than DVD and a visual epiphany for me. I discovered some of the exotic VOOM channels like Equator (a nature channel) and national HD offerings such as Discovery HD Theater (now just HD Theater). I soon became hooked on an HD Theater program called Sunrise Earth, which offered spectacular views of sunrises all across the globe. Who knew watching the sun come up could be so beautiful and breathtaking? (As if I’d ever get up early enough to watch a sunrise in real time!) I was so taken by the quality of the images I saw that one morning I was late for work because I was stupefied by the stunningly clear image of a moose wading into a pond in Maine as the morning sun made the water shimmer. You could even see individual droplets of water fall from that moose’s hide as he emerged from the shallow pool.
    In 2006, a 26-inch LCD sold for just under $1,000—and it didn’t include an over-the-air (OTA) tuner. Now, the same size and type HDTV—with a tuner—sells for less than two-thirds of that price. Yes, I might have benefited if I had pursued my original DVD player policy. But, I didn’t. C’est la vie.
    Later, after acquiring a compatible OTA tuner for that flat panel TV, I have discovered what I call “free definition”—the local HDTV channels available to most people with a set of rabbit ears. The signals aren’t compressed, and the images are truly, truly stunning. Who knew The Today Show could look so sharp and brilliant?
    My HDTV addition hit a snag a few months after it began, however. As the summer progressed, a tree began blocking my satellite signal and I had to give it all up, except for the few OTA channels I received.
    But you know how it is with an addiction, even a fairly harmless one. You just can’t let it go. Using the Internet, I found a newer type of satellite dish that was more versatile in terms of where it could be mounted—and I got my HDTV back, all without the aid of a professional installer.
    Yes, sometimes those rain forest tree frogs—or even The Today Show—will almost make me late for work again. But what can I say? I’m hooked. (And if there is a 12-step program for HDTV addicts, I don’t want to know about it.)

Glenn Farr is editor of NACA’s Campus Activities Programming and a technophile who chooses not to age gracefully in that respect. And while getting his first HDTV (he now has two) was a guilty secret for a while, he felt even guiltier when he bought into HD DVD--right before it went belly up.