I was threatening it for some time now, but this week I finally manned up and bought an HDTV. I went with a 40" Sony Bravia W-series. For the incredible contrast ratio. Why only a 40", you ask? Well, we just didn't want to have to re-arrange the couch and entertainment center. So I scouted for the best TV I could find that was physically no wider than 42". In the Sony line, the next step up from W-series is XBR-series... but the smallest XBR is a 40" with a 43" base, so that was a non-starter.

Obviously it's a serious purchase, and there I was at Circuit City comparing the W-series to the V-series and thinking "Am I really going to spend another several hundred bucks for that contrast ratio?!?"

Then I picked up a $20 PS3 HDMI cable and a $20 Wii component cable. Both by the same company, some dopey no-name. I know $20 is a ridiculously good price for an HDMI cable, so either Toys R Us had the price screwed up or my HDMI is of low quality. Although the PS3 looks freakin' incredible, so I'm happy with the HDMI thus far.

My big fear was analog cable. Regular old cable TV looks like ass on an HDTV set. There seems to be no way around this. It's taking an image that's 420 or whatever and blowing it up to 1080. It's crap. I'm glad that it doesn't look as bad as I imagined - or as bad as some sets I've seen - but it's still pretty bad. It reminds me of two things... watching a really big YouTube video, or what TV was like in the pre-cable era. It's not unwatchable, but it's mostly distasteful.

I fooled around with the video settings - MPEG compression filters and whatnot - to try to smooth out the analog broadcast. It's tough to tell if I actually accomplished anything. Cartoons generally look better than the live-action stuff, thanks to the set's insanely sharp and vivid colors. So that's cool.

Then I swapped the HDMI cable off the PS3 to see what it does for the HD channels, and it was quite an improvement over the SD analog s-video. I need to pick up a second HDMI cable so I don't have to switch it all the time. I have noticed that I'm getting quick blips of audio drop out when I'm on cable HDMI (HD and SD), so I'm not sure what that's about. Either my cheap HDMI cable is worse for cable than for PS3 (how could that be?), or the HDMI-out on the cable box is buggered. I suppose I could work around the issue by sending the audio out through one of the other ports. UPDATE: Tonight, I have yet to notice any audio dropout, so WTF.

Even after seeing HD channels in genuine HD, I'm still not a fan of this big HD broadcast revolution. I think everyone else in the world has a different opinion of the words sharpness and clarity than I do. This HD thing was sold on being perfect, to my recollection. But the image still has little digital fuzziness when you get in close. I guess you're not supposed to get in close. Imagine me standing an inch from the screen, staring at the HGTV-HD logo in the corner of the screen and getting pissed that it isn't vector-image sharp. That's my evening.

But the new TV is really for teh gaming.

Having the PS3 finally pushed to hi-def reminds me why you pay so much for that thing. If you have a PS3 on standard-def, you are cheating yourself at least $150 of its worth. For me, the most shocking change was PixelJunk Monsters going from SD to HD. Holy shit. Monsters is, perhaps unfortunately, built for HD without a low-fi version, so the standard definition display meant that the 1080p widescreen game was getting letterboxed and downsampled for SD. You could barely see the enemy life meters. Now, it's a white-hot animated feast, with huge, impressive characters and outstanding, vibrant colors.

There's not a smidge of HD expense regret there.

I mean, I knew that Warhawk was going to look better in HD, but seeing Monsters in its native form was just astonishing.

I think the best thing is that all this HD-ness shifts all the gaming HUD elements out of the way. I feel like I can finally breathe in Warhawk! Last night I got my Bandit Teamwork award, which means I can move to the next player rank (now that Sony fixed that ranking bug, I'm no longer a default Commander.)

The Wii, on the other hand, is another story. The Wii caps at 420p, which my Sony TV helpfully reminds me every time I switch inputs. 420p upconverted to 1080p does not do the Wii menu screen any favors. I won't say that Nintendo made a mistake in not pursuing HD output on the Wii, but it sure does underline a difference between them and the competition. As more and more people jump to HD, Nintendo is going to look more foolish at the end of this generation than they did at the beginning of it. I would not be surprised to see an HD Wii show up sometime in 2009, as an end run Wii push before Nintendo leaps on to what's next, and to capitalize on the amount of people who finally go HD. I think the switch rate from SD to HD is even faster than the change from dialup to broadband.

And really, it's only the core system that needs an upgrade, not so much the games. I popped in Mario Galaxy and found it fine, far sharper than the Wii menu. It's like the Wii itself isn't even 420p, the channel boxes and text are so smooshy and blurred. Kinda sucks. I haven't tried any of my Virtual Console games yet (OMG Pokemon Snap in HD!!!11!), but I don't expect them to look any better.

The goal was to get an HD set before Smash Bros (again, good for HUD stuff) and before GTAIV. ACHIEVEMENT UNLOCKED.