“me, my girlfriend and the two gay love hounds”

So how was your Lunar New Year? Did you do anything fun or, better yet, crazy? Me, I decided to celebrate the Year of the Golden Pig by acting in an appropriately piggy fashion. I went out and spent insane amounts of money so that I could have a High Definition semi-state-of-the-art video set-up… in my bedroom, no less. Yeah, I know, but we (being me, my girlfriend and the two gay love hounds) watch a lot more TV in bed. (That sentence, including the bits between the brackets, may go a long way towards explaining why I don’t get a lot of sleep.)

I started by buying a 40-inch LCD TV (that’s about the largest size that would reasonably fit in that room) that can do “full 1080p” resolution. No, I’m not going to start boring you with technical jargon and charts filled with obscure numbers. Let’s just say that today it’s the top end. Tomorrow it will probably be depressingly low tech.

In semi-typical HK fashion, the TV was actually delivered relatively on time by someone who simply slid the box into my flat and then ran away. The ‘installers’ came about 30 minutes later. They removed the TV from the box, hooked up my cable box and then apologized that they didn’t have time to hook up anything else because they were “very busy”. They then put on a look that said, “Hey, you can afford a TV like this, we surely cannot, how’s about a tip?” And I attempted to do my best “Well, you’re too busy to properly install this, I’m gonna be too busy setting up everything else to go looking for my wallet!” look.

Going from a 29” picture tube TV to this big power sucker, everything looked better. Bigger and brighter and sharper. Even TVB and ATV were almost bearable.

And then, time to test it with a DVD. I chose 2001: A Space Odyssey. Depending on the day, I might claim this to be my all-time favourite film. I’d say that I know every line of dialogue by heart, but that’s not hard when a 148-minute movie has less than 30 minutes of talking (and five minutes of that is HAL singing Daisy). Actually, I probably know every shot in this film, and not just because I later ended up working for the guy who shot the aerial footage used towards the end. I’m just that geeky, I suppose. Anyway, it looked amazing. The picture was so big, the colours so perfect, the image so sharp, it felt like I was watching it for the first time in 30 years.

Then it was time to go for HD DVDs. You see, from the movie studios’ perspective, while DVDs still make a lot of money, sales of the discs have basically flatlined in the past year. Most of the catalogue stuff has been released two or three times and growth prospects are minimal. A new format was needed which might excite the consumer with a high-tech new product or at least allow the studios to get you to buy the same stuff you already bought.

And the kicker is that the powers that be have decided that we consumers are nostalgic for the VHS/Beta war and want to be confused again by two competing formats. While some Hollywood studios are simultaneously supporting both formats, a select few have planted their flags in a single camp. That meant if I wanted to go full-tilt geek, I had to buy two different players. (Yeah, I know, LG has put out a combo player, but that costs more than two separate players and isn’t fully HD-DVD certified.)
So I went out and bought both the Playstation 3 (for Blu-Ray discs) and Microsoft’s XBOX 360 with the optional HD-DVD drive. And while I did buy a couple of games for each box, I’m not so much into that. I like simple games – Tetris, Pac Man, Wanchai (oops, sorry, maybe that one’s not a video game… yet). Life is too short for me to have to learn that I can kill my opponent if I simultaneously press the X and the O while holding down the
L1 and spinning on my right elbow while singing the Chilean national anthem.

So, PS3 and XBOX installed. The first thing I noticed was that while the PS3 is a sleek looking hunk o’ plastic, you pretty much need a PhD in rocket science to run it. If it’s bombing in the marketplace, no wonder! At least with the XBOX, you pretty much just turn it on and you’re there.

And then, finally, the movies. And I have to admit, movies on both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD look amazing. The extra resolution does make a noticeable difference. Everything is much sharper and details that might have been fuzzy on regular DVDs are brought into clear focus.

As a final test, I picked something which I have in all three formats – DVD, HD-DVD and Blu-Ray. It’s not a big special effects movie like Star Wars (which isn’t available in HD yet anyway) nor some lavish costume epic. The one I picked is at the opposite end of the spectrum – Blazing Saddles. And yes, I went right to the baked beans scene. (If you’ve never seen it – is there someone who has never seen this movie? – this classic scene features something we’ve seen in hundreds of horse operas, cowboys sitting around a campfire eating plates of baked beans. But unlike those hundreds of horse operas, their dialogue is soon drowned out by the sound of all of them farting away.)

I studied the image on the DVD, looking at the plates of beans
and bread. And then I looked at the same details on both Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. Wow, you could make out every individual grain on the bread. It was so sharp, you could almost reach out and
eat it.

But then I thought, “Does being able to see the detail on the bread make the scene any funnier?” Not in the least. You could watch this movie on a 9th generation VHS copy in black and white and you’ll still laugh every time Lily Von Shtupp asks “Is that a ten-gallon hat or are you just enjoying the show?”

I bought my first CD player more than 20 years ago and the difference was so dramatic that I’d look at my wall of 5,000 LPs and 10 CDs and think to myself, “I’ve got nothing to play.” But I’m fine with my current DVDs. I don’t feel any urge to run out and replace them with Hi-Def.

And that’s okay, because I suspect that within five years we’ll be reading that the studios didn’t master this first crop of discs as well as they might, or that they’ve come up with better, more interactive special features that you just “have to have!”

Am I glad I upgraded? Definitely. Will I buy new releases in new HD formats instead of the old regular def? Probably. Of course, most people are not as crazy as me and only want to buy one Hi-Def format, not two. So if you’re only going to buy one and want to make sure you’re going with the winner, the choice is easy. Just wait awhile and see which one has more porn.