4 posts tagged “hdtv”

Don't look now, but the M's are 2-0 after beating the A's 8-4 today.  Looks like tomorrow's game is on FSN so I'll have to see about tuning that in.  Rumor has it that Comcast showed today's FSN broadcast in HD on Comcast 664.  That tip actually led me to several more HD channels that seem to be available to us like Universal HD (BSG season 3 reruns are broadcast in HD on Saturdays), TNTHD, MTVHD and DHD.  Oddly, ESPN2HD seems to be the only HD specific channel I've found so far that doesn't work for us. 

I watched the NCAA women's championship tonight on ESPNHD and was pleased to see Tennessee pull out the victory.  It's kind of hard to believe that they hadn't won a championship in 9 years, but as a Ferris person I can certainly relate.  It only took us 13 years to win our second state title.  Pat Summitt now has 7 titles and I would have to say that I like her odds to at least tie Wooden's 10 career titles record.  And hopefully Angie Bjorkland will get a chance to win a title herself during her upcoming Volunteer career. 

Watching the NCAA basketball championship in HD last night was pretty cool.  The detail really jumped out every time the camera panned across the crowds.  I'm really looking forward to watching some sports like football, soccer,  baseball and golf (the Masters is next weekend!) that take place on much larger playing fields that will really benefit from the increased detail.  On a happy HD note we also get ESPNHD as part of our package so I should be able to find plenty of sports programming to watch this summer.

I poked around On Demand a little last night and found a few free HD movies.  Besides HD content I discovered that they had quite a few free older movies that I hadn't seen and wouldn't mind watching.  There were some classic Alfred Hitchcock movies that looked pretty interesting for instance.  I ended up watching Escape from New York in HD and was pretty impressed with the picture quality.  When I had previously seen parts of that movie in 480i pan and scan it had come across to me as a much cheesier and lower quality movie than it actually was. 

The Comcast guy came by this morning and hooked up our digital/hd tuner box.  I contemplated getting the HD-DVR when I ordered the upgrade last week, but at this point I couldn't justify the additional $12 a month for the dvr since I knew we would still be able to recorder the conventional channels anyway with the dvd-recorder.  I didn't get a chance to explore our channel selection too much, but On Demand (gave the Ferris - Kentwood game from state a quick try) and the local HD channels worked fine.  CBS is the important station tonight with the NCAA Championship, but ESPN HD was working fine while the cable guy was doing setup.  It wasn't clear to me whether or not we would get those channels as well since they're higher up in the cable listings, but I'm hopeful.

I still have to fine tune our wiring set up too.  Our little compact stereo only has one set of audio inputs so that complicates things now that we have a dvd recorder that may not interface with the Comcast box very well.  On the other hand now that I think about it I wonder if our television has audio outputs? 

After examining our cable bill yesterday and looking at Comcast's latest deal I decided to finally pull the trigger and order Enhanced Cable along with HD.  At $33 a month (for the next six months) + $5 for HD it's cheaper than what we were currently paying for the old comparable analog package and it's only a few dollars more once it goes up to regular price.  I'm fairly excited to be able to watch the NCAA Basketball final in HD this year.  Furthermore, the On Demand functionality is getting more and more content that I'm interested in.  I think replays of 5 or 6 games from this year's Ferris basketball season are currently being offered as well as quite a few games from the rest of Washington.  It also sounds like they have quite a bit of kids programming on there too which will be great for Eawyn.