In The Company Of Glenn

Carroll Gardens twilight, with drizzle

Let me show you my Pokemans.

So the tragicomic tale of my own dumb snafus chronicled in an earlier post has reached a very satisfying conclusion. This time, rather than bargain-hunt my way into blunder, I heeded the sage advice of my Close Personal Friend and full-time consumer electronics guru Ron Goldberg of Convey Technologies, who made a strong case that, yes, while the Panasonic 50-inch I was looking at was a worthwhile model, Hitachi's plasma sets are consistently underrated and possess strengths not found in the competition. Armed with my Blu-Ray disc of The Wild Bunch I hied to J&R Music World, did my own viewing, and walked away with a fine Hitcahi model, and the shot you see above (not a good one, but it'll do) is how the set looks straight-out-the-box, before Ron and I do any double-secret-probation-calibrations on it. One thing we're going to want to do is increase the "cinematic" look of the set. It's astonishing how many Hi-Def sets out there, via varied video processing circuits, "enhance" the picture to the extent that if you're looking at a movie it doesn't look like a movie at all. I watched the opening sequence of Bunch on a new LCD 52-inch from a different manufacturer and the thing looked like...high definition video. Some similarities to very good NTSC broadcast of a live signal. I got a distinct soap-opera vibe from it. This is the sense in which "too good" actually is no good at all. I can see why this sort of picture would appeal to those who wanna watch live sports all the time. But I ain't one of those. The Hitachi set seems to have the capacity to handle every type of material I, My Lovely Wife, and our guests would want to watch, and l give us pretty much exactly what we want from said material. I am pretty thrilled, and now have a huge bunch of DVD reviewing to catch up on.

My Pokemans: let me show you them.

The Screens

"Hey Glenn," you ask (in the privacy of my imagination, that is), "what do you make of David Denby's article 'Big Pictures' in the January 8 issue of The New Yorker, in which he examines how digital technology and the internets and such are changing movie-watching and moviemaking?"