HD

It is quite astounding, the inescapable lure into the lounge. There, on the coffee-table-turned-TV-stand, perches the pièce de résistance: A 32" (80 cm) Panasonic HD TV. Finally, after months of contemplation, research and agonising over the capital outlay, I clicked the button to order the icon of the modern lounge. It arrived in 3 days on standard delivery terms, intact, courtesy of Amazon and Partners.

I am not a man for gadgets, do not own a Palm Pilot; Trio; iPod; XBox; coffeemaker; bread machine; water dispenser; powered golf cart; self-cleaning laundary; electric toothbrush; automatic toilet paper, powered hair brush or gas BBQ contraption. My cell phone does not greet me and neither does it make me tea in the afternoon. My 1 GB Nano I got for free; my BBQ is by charcoal on a Webber; my bread I buy at Shaws; my laundry I do myself including ironing. I wipe my ass myself; brush my teeth with the classic Oral-B; comb my gelled hair with my fingers. And I do not play golf. Instead I walk to Shaws to buy bread. My cell phone makes and takes phone calls. Full stop. OK, it does the same with messages and pretends to have a camera, which is like a sun-roof - all show and pretty useless beyond that. I didn't want the stupid excuse for a camera feature, the same sentiments I held about the sunroof in my GTi. But you know how it goes with bundling.

Up to recently my TV experience had been mundane. A zillion channels of rubbish did not improve that situation either. Came HD content and I went tut-tut-tut. What visual experience one got from a 52 cm piece of shit CRT made by Daewoo 10 years ago was tantamount to showing Lord of the Rings via smoke signals. Planet Earth did it though - drove the final nail into my procrastination; drove me to my PC to do the one gadget thing: Online shopping.

The past two weeks has changed my past-time focus. Suddenly, I actually can enjoy viewing some of those channels that has caught my attention before but visually bored me due to bad delivery. Discovery HD and National Geographic stand out from that thinly planted field. Suddenly, I am not glued in front of my PC day and night.

But the viewing has not been without its frustrations. Panasonic, like the rest of them, appears bent on default settings that are plain lunacy. Overdriven contrast, brightness and colour only serve the showroom pageantry to any extent. At home such settings turn any decent video into grotesque examples of art nouveau. So, I have started on a quest for imagery perfection.

Alas, Google has not been of much help here and God appears to be biting his divine tongue lest he may burst out in sheer laughter at my folly. Google, apparently nudged from above, has led me to the service menu only to leave me in a torture chamber. Please note that buying the newest editions of things leaves one without support from other users. I have been spending my evenings since tweaking the complicated 3-way colour profiles in an attempt to balance acceptable settings across a range of video material. I have reached a point where giving in and buying a calibration DVD will be the only sane option.

An HD TV begs an upgrade of a mediocre SD DVD player, which cannot even play dual layer DVD's without stumbling into a stupor. So I clicked that button again and Voilà! two days later, a Toshiba HD A2 arrived at my door, courtesy of Amazon and Partners. This one turned out rather straight-forward. It worked and worked well from the start without setting anything. Now I need HD DVD's. Planet Earth, with Sir David Attenborough as narrator, is tempting me on Amazon.

"On a clear day one can see forever."

Gadgets? Me? HD TV is essential for a balanced mind. Sure.