Hallelujah, My TV Just Died!

It's been a pretty busy news day-we know for sure that Apple will announce new iPods next Wednesday, and rumors about a Googlephone are reaching fever pitch. I may get around to blogging about this stuff. But right this very moment, I'm sitting in my living room, staring at my TV--and its picture, which is little more than a thin horizontal line of color surrounded by blackness.

My set--a 27-inch Panasonic tube I bought around a decade ago--is dead, dead, dead...or at least its tube is. That means I need to get a new TV, which means I'll finally step into the world of HDTV. I'm excited, but intimidated, too, by the gazillion things I need to do to get there.

For one thing, I need to decide what kind of TV to buy. I'm so early in that decision process that I'm still conidering both cheap little 26-inch 720p LCDs and relatively pricey 56-inch 1080p DLP monsters. My guess is that I'll kinda split the different and wind up buying a 40- or 42-inch 1080p LCD or plasma, but you never know.)

For another thing, as I stare at the jumble of devices sitting on and near my Panasonic, I'm a little daunted by how many things I'll need to do to get HDTV content into whatever new TV I buy. I'm going to have to replace both my DirecTV satellite dish and its set-top box. My TiVo, which I upgraded with a 300GB hard drive, and which carries no monthly fee, only does standard def. Same thing for my DVD player/burner, and my game console (a Wii). Unless I upgrade most all of these devices--which may cost more than I'll spend on the TV itself--my entertainment center will remain decidedly SD, not HD.

I'm still looking forward to this journey, though. I always told myself I'd go high-definition all at once, but now I'm thinking that I'll get the TV in the next few days, and replace the other components one-by-one. Right now, I'm stuck with a TV that can't even display standard definition TV, so just about anything would be a step in the right direction,

(Side note: I have and love a Slingbox, and it'll really come in handy while I'm TV-less: I can watch all the DirecTV and TiVo stuff I want on my notebook and desktop PC's displays.)

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