Out With the Old and In With the New

For about the past 12+ years I have had the same gaming setup you see below.

Kev's Old TV

The TV you see there was a 27" Sanyo SDTV. It's so old that it only had an RF input, so I had to play all my gaming systems through a VCR. For the past two months, the screen had started to get wavy after a few hours of play and I had to leave it off for a few minutes to make the wavyness stop.

Anyway, I wanted my next TV to be an HDTV, so I could actually make out my games on it without having to squint at times. If you've ever tried to play Infinite Undiscovery on an SDTV or tried to write a game script for Dead Rising while playing on one, then you know how blurry some text can get while playing a High Definition game on an SDTV.

After much asking around from friends and in-store employees, I finally settled on this 42" Panasonic VIERA Plasma 1080p HDTV. A Circuit City employee and a Best Buy employee recommended it to me after I mentioned that I want a TV for gaming, so I went ahead and went with it. Mind you, it was bought for $999 at Best Buy then I found it later at Circuit City for $899 and managed to get a price match.

Here's a few pics:

Kev's New TV 1
Kev's New TV 2

My dad helped me set it up last Saturday. My first game to experience on it was the RE5 demo. I played it the day before on my SDTV then I played it the next night on my new HDTV. In the matter of a day, I had gone from extreme fanboy excitement (playing RE5 on... anything) to pure unadulterated bliss (playing RE5 in 1080i HD). There's no way I could have timed that better!

Dead Space looks fantastic on it too, and I still have yet to try many of my older games. Need to break out Dead Rising soon also. Wii doesn't look that hot, nor do any of the older systems, but at least there's no lag associated with them like I've read about with some HDTV's.

If you look at the pics, I've also got a new 5.1 surround setup (silver speakers in new pics) in place of my old 2.1 surround setup (black speakers in old pic). It's got a lot more bass than my previous speakers... well, that's what my parents have told me anyway, haha.