The Two Alberts Buy a New TV! ... and one more thing too...

So we did it :) We officially joined the HDTV fraternity! Julie and I figured if we had to live in the townhome for another year, we'd get ourselves a new TV at some point. Originally, we had thought it would be sometime this summer, but one of the TVs I had been looking at was being discontinued. Best Buy matched Amazon.com's low price, and shortly after we brought it home...
Here's me with the box. It's a Samsung 4041D 40" 720p LCD screen. We also got an upconverting 5 disc DVD player that was on sale the next day.


This is a pic of the "unboxing" and a comparison of the size of our old TV.


We rearranged the living room by bringing the TV stand from the spare bedroom down, moving 3 of our DVD shelves to the left of the room with our movies, and the remaining one to the right part of the room with our TV shows. We got the high def cable hooked up on Friday, and the wiring was so old in our place that it took a couple of hours to get it working. We also switched to a cable modem and the VoIP package through Comcast, since it was essentially the same price we were paying for phone, internet, cable, and TiVos. We're going to sell the TiVos as soon as we've watched our old programs. The new DVR is definately a step down from TiVos, but hopefully Comcast will get off their butts and get the TiVo software upgrade available soon.


Here's a shot of the room showing the left side of the room. We also swapped out Julie's coffee table for my coffee table. Overall, the room seems bigger and more open.

As far as how the TV looks, it looks pretty good! With standard def stuff, it looks ok, but high def programming really makes it shine. We watched Star Wars Episode III and it looked very good. I've noticed that there can be some ghosting with dark scenes, but Julie doesn't really notice, and I can live with it. Black colors look pretty good.

All in all, we're very happy with the purchase and it'll make living in the townhome easier until we get a house!

Oh yeah, one more thing :) I got the Wii! There was a friend of a guy at work who wanted to sell his for a very fair price. Thanks for my early birthday gift, baby! I got the system, 3 remotes, 2 nunchucks, HD cables, Wii Sports, Wii Play, Legend of Zelda, and Wario Ware. Julie surprised me this afternoon by getting Cooking Momma. I think we're set with video game systems for the next few years...