Remember that TV I purchased a while ago? That was in January 2005. Almost immediately after I bought it, HDTVs became the "next big thing". The XBox360 uses HDTV, and would be out only a couple months later (November 2005). The PS3, it was announced at the time, would be using HDTV. People figured the Nintendo Revolution ("Revolution" was what the Wii was called before they changed the name to Wii) would use HDTV. BluRay and HD-DVD would be in HD quality. "Don't bother buying a non-HDTV", the analysts said. They'd be obsolete before you unpack it out of the box. The future is HDTV. No wonder that TV was being sold for so cheap. They were trying to unload their non-HDTV crap onto me, the unsuspecting consumer. I connected my computer to the TV via a S-Video cable, and the image quality was indeed quite disappointing. The resolution was so low, I couldn't read websites, as the text was all blurry. I guess I got fucked.

Couple months ago, Thany, the guitarist of my band brings over his XBox360. I apologize for a lack of HD, and we move to set up a pathetic composite connection. So Thany's behind my TV, and he tells me there's an HD connector here.

"Huh?"

"Yeah, this red-blue-green connector here is for HD."

So we try plugging in an HD cable, and boot up the X360, and the logo shows, and Ghost Recon game loads up, and it looks really great, but I have no idea if the image really is an HD image or not. Maybe the game looks this good on non-HDTVs. The interface for Ghost Recon has a lot of rounded rectangles, so I'm staring at the corners, trying to find some pixelation, but I can't spot any. It's impressive, but maybe the XBox is just doing some very high level anti-aliasing. Thany tells me, though, that if I didn't have an HDTV, I wouldn't get any image at all on the screen. He's tried it, and he just gets a black screen when he sets the 360 to HD mode on a non-HDTV. So maybe I do have an HDTV...

After Thany leaves (taking his 360 with him), I go through the manual that came with my TV cover to cover. There isn't a single mention of the HDTV feature in here. I'm looking all over the frame of the TV, reading the labels on the back, and while they warn against the danger of electrocution, they too never bother to mention that this is in fact an HDTV. I'm perplexed. Why would they want to "hide" this feature? I'm also wondering (since it doesn't say anywhere) what kind of HDTV this is. 1080i? 1080p? 720p? Or possibly even the crappy died-before-it-got-mainstream 576p AKA "Enhanced Definition TV"?

Months later, I decided to resolve this mystery once and for all and order some component video cables. My computer is capable of producing an HDTV signal, but I never bothered to try it out, because I didn't think I had an HDTV to test it on. The cable arrived a couple of days later, i.e. yesterday.

My TV is a 1080i, which is essentially as good as HDTV gets. The Japanese actually have something better than HDTV (called ultraHDTV, and has 16 times higher resolution than 1080, and a single 1.5 hour movie would take up 11 BluRay discs or 67 DVDs to store), but the Japanese, as we know, are crazy. I was able to surf around on FireFox on my HDTV, and read the text.

Most of the video clips I had on my computer were NOT HD, though (anime episodes, etc.), and so I couldn't really take advantage of the full resolution of my TV. But I'll be looking for HD content in the near future to get maximum appreciation out of my device.