Broadcasted Visual Images

About two years ago, I wrote and published a blog post about my television, and the fact that we owned rabbit ears in an age where everyone else seemed to be buying high definition TVs with 500 gazillion channels. I stressed that I found nothing wrong with this - I don't watch TV, not generally, and I don't see any point in spending every hour of my life doing so (which is the only way I would get anything out of all those channels). However, at that time, broadcasting companies had just switched over to digital signals, and we had to buy a digital converter box for our rabbit ears to work.

The actual Rabbit Ears we used to use.

I was amazed, because, as I explained in that blog, we used to get horrible white-noise under all our TV programs, and with the converter box, live TV sounded just as good as shows on Hulu.

A couple months back, Mom signed our house up for FiOS TV. I'm not quite sure why she did it. We now have about 100 channels, (before, we had three or four), and we don't use 95% of them. Along with our weekly TV shows, my mom occasionally watches stuff on the Home and Garden channel, and my dad listens to people shouting at each other on some political channel, and if anything, we've cut down on movie-watching, so the TV's on just as often as it usually was.

I don't want to sound like I'm complaining. We can now set our TV to record shows if we're going to miss them, and watch them later without having to set the low-quality laptop up to the TV and such. I've been setting our DVR to record movies on various channels if I know Netflix doesn't have them on Instant, and it's been nice. Also, the thing automatically resets the time for Daylight Savings, so we can change all the rest of the clocks to match it. That's always handy.

We still don't have an HD TV, which I still see nothing wrong with - the picture on our screen looks just fine, especially when compared with the picture I grew up with. It's cool to see that, even in the time of High Definition Everything, my friends and I can sit down to an older movie and not be bothered by the boxy, pixelated images. The difference between HD picture and normal modern TV picture is slight enough for me not to notice unless I had the two side-by-side (which is, of course, how the electronic stores get you to pay all that money).

I'm sure one day in the future, I'll own an HD TV, and I'll be blogging about how silly everyone is for needing a 3D TV (or whatever else is popular at that time) to get by. That's the way technology goes, and I don't really see any problem in it, as long as we don't get too dependent on our shiny screens.

(Now I'm afraid of sounding like one of those old persons, warning you that TV's going to melt your brain. Don't worry, it wont - unless you watch TV in the car. I know "everyone" does it nowadays, but it drives me crazy. How are kids supposed to get any downtime if they're constantly stimulated everywhere they go?)