It’s here! We have it! Sony Bravia Z Series, 40". Delivered yesterday (Saturday). We love it already. The wife has definitely warmed up to it :D.
It’s also definitely caused a problem with the wall picture, by partially hiding it. We may opt for a new stand that’s somewhet lower, then we can move the picture up a bit, and that might work. But we’ll figure all of that out later. The wife now agrees the 40" was the right choice.
We inaugurated the new machine with the director’s cut of Woodstock, the Oscar winner for Best Documentary of 1970. Our Leonard Maltin guide pointed out that the skilled use of double and triple screens might be lost on a TV set, but it wasn’t on this baby. Problem is the director’s cut runs almost four hours, and we had to get up early today, so we watched only half. We usually hate watching movies only part way, have to watch them from beginning to end in one sitting, never understood how people could do otherwise, but this isn’t like it’s a murder mystery or anything. We had to get up early today because of Qingming. Not a Thai holiday, but rather a Chinese tradition – the wife is ethnic Chinese – in which the graves of ancestors are cleaned. Her family has no more graves, though, as the temple where everyone’s ashes and bone fragments were kept was renovated awhile back, and everyone was out. All the relatives were ceremoniously deposited in the Gulf of Thailand instead, buried at sea. But it’s still a feast day for any Chinese household, as well as an actual public holiday in China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau.
But I digress. Woodstock is a great first film to see on a big TV screen despite the lower quality of the filmmaking craft at the time. We still have to work and figure out the controls. The clock appeared onscreen for a while, and I could not make it go away. It eventually did after a long time, but I don’t know why. The “Video 1” designation up in the corner when we switched to DVD mode never went away; must be a way to make it disappear. But we’ll figure it out; must go through the manual.
We discussed DVD players with the two delivery guys. They said if we got a Blu-ray player, we should play ONLY Blu-ray discs in it, never a regular DVD. They said the head in these machines were very exact – I never thought of a DVD player as having a “head,” like in a tape player, but that’s the word they used – and that the quality could deteriorate if used on a Blu-ray. They recommended that if we did get another DVD player, it not be Blu-ray unless we really planned to watch a lot of Blu-ray discs. As for the Blu-ray players, they said they came in all prices but that the highest quality was this new one that Pioneer just came out with, costing 100,000 baht. :eek:!!!:eek: That’s US$2800! But their shop has actually already received an order for one from someone here in Thailand. They agreed that as far as DVD players of any type go, Pioneer is the best quality. That’s what we have now.
I’ve not been able to find a Widesceen anything in the DVD player’s Setup, though. It’s only 5 years old, so I figure it could be in there somewhere. I’ll have to look through it’s manual for it. But the movie last night looked good.
As for the old Trinitron, it’s going to find a new home with a colleague of the wife’s. This lady’s family just bought a second home to use on the weekends, as it’s close to the children’s tutoring schools. Thai children always seem to spend an inordinate amount of time in tuturing schools. But they don’t have a TV for it yet, and we’re giving them the Trinitron.
