Monday, December 11, 2006

Live from Kennedy Space Center in HD

Since I am laid up with the broke-ass-ankle Brent and I decided that we would forgo us exchanging gifts and just decide on one thing that we both want and buy that for ourselves for Christmas. Madison had a Christmas party to attend on Friday night with her soccer team so that allowed us to spend some time shopping for this one thing that we both wanted.

We ended up at the Best Buy drooling over the big flat screen TV's. We love our LG washer and dryer so much we were checking out the LG 42" LCD with built in DVR and HDTV. Turns out that the DVR does not work with our cable company's system so it was basically useless. This made us turn our sights to the LG 42" Plasma HDTV it was about $350 cheaper than the LCD and the picture was just as good if not better quality. They had one in stock so we made the deal and agreed to the 4 year service plan for an additional $250.

Well of course it is not ever that simple with electronics. In order to connect the TV to our Moxi DVR box from Charter and achieve the best possible picture quality we also needed a special HDMI cable that cost $99.00 We want the best possible picture quality after all that is why we are spending so much on the TV in the first place right?

So we are ready to check out and the salesman says there is one last thing we need to consider - the condition of our power to the TV. WHAT? I have a surge protector. That is not good enough - you need a power conditioner to handle the peaks and valleys of the power to the device. How much I say? A mere $249.00 to protect our investment. Actually it has 10 outlets so we can plug the surround system that we can no longer afford since we just bought a mini power plant for our TV. But if something should happen to any of our devices plugged into our power conditioner, it is insured up to $100,000.00! Luckily Brent had received a Best Buy gift card for his birthday worth $15.00 so he handed it to the salesman and said "this should take care of it". We are finally out the door and spent $2,200.00, after the gift card (thanks Sean and Alycia). In all fairness our Best Buy salesman was a straight shooter and wonderful to work with.

Our Moxi box has a remote that you can program to also turn your TV on and off. Well we did not have the instructions or the code for the LG TV so Saturday Brent calls Charter and gets that all handled and then asks the nice man on the phone about subscribing to HDTV. They tell him that our Moxi box is HD ready and they can remotely activate that service and it is only $7.99 per month. We now get HDTV, 10 more channels added to the 500 billion we already get.

The first thing we watched on HDTV was the space shuttle launch live - it was incredible. The picture quality is absolutely amazing we were mesmerized. I also got to watch my Chargers spank the Broncos in HD. The picture is so good that we now find ourselves being HD snobs. We can't stand to watch anything that is not in HD it looks so horribly bad like you were using rabbit ears or something archaic like that.

Now all we need is a surround sound system and we will be set for the winter, I already have it picked out we just need to save some more money.

1 comment:

Jeff Moser said...

I want pictures!

I bought an HDMI cable for $150 once, and it almost made me sick by the time I got home that I spent that much money on 3 feet of cable. Luckily it wasn't compatible with my TV and we took it back. We definitely sunk money into the Monster Cable Power Conditioner though. Oh Yeah. Lots of pretty lights...