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by Rick Norwood
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| What to watch in November: | |
After mildly entertaining, mildly disappointing premiers of Buffy, Enterprise, and
Smallville, I certainly hope the premier of The X-Files blows me away. I'm still
waiting for a genre TV show as good as Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, or Babylon 5.
For Babylon 5: The Legend of the Rangers, we still have to wait until 2002.
There may not be much on TV to watch, but I'm watching it in style. I blew the money I made teaching summer school
on a wide-screen high-definition TV. A few observations.
After watching high definition DVDs, it is astonishing how grainy the television I've been watching all my life
looks. The high-def picture is absolutely worth it. My feelings about the wide screen, on the other hand, are slightly
So, high definition has my unqualified recommendation. Wide screen is nice, but still has some bugs in it.
And more important than either high-definition or wide-screen is good sound. You haven't really experienced
The X-Files until you've heard something sneaking up on you from behind!
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Rick Norwood is a mathematician and writer whose small press publishing house, Manuscript Press, has published books by Hal Clement, R.A. Lafferty, and Hal Foster. He is also the editor of Comics Revue Monthly, which publishes such classic comic strips as Flash Gordon, Sky Masters, Modesty Blaise, Tarzan, Odd Bodkins, Casey Ruggles, The Phantom, Gasoline Alley, Krazy Kat, Alley Oop, Little Orphan Annie, Barnaby, Buz Sawyer, and Steve Canyon. |
Wednesday, November 7
mixed. On the plus side, both Enterprise and my favorite TV show, The West Wing, are now
broadcast wide screen. On the minus side, there is no such thing as a perfect wide-screen picture yet. You have to
make compromises. The set I bought, a Toshiba TW56X81, offers no less than 5 different ways of viewing a
film: Standard, three flavors of Theater Wide, and Full. Full is wretched: it overflows the screen with whatever picture
you've got. Standard is just for standard TV (or old movies, which I watch a lot). But choosing between those three
flavors of Theater Wide drives me crazy, since wide-screen DVDs, unless they are anamorphic, just won't fit. Either you
loose picture or you get a distorted picture. The three choices trade off picture loss and distortion.
 
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