carbon14 Blog

Our main domestic TV is on the fritz. To be completely honest, this is not new, it always had a habit of turning itself off if a taxi drove past, and the OSD had a way of moving around the screen every six months as though it got bored of the view and wanted to try something different. At the moment it's halfway off the screen to the left. There is a way of getting to a secret engineer's menu and adjusting it, but I've forgotten how and I can't be bothered to go and root out the instruction manual.

The big problem now with the telly is that it has trouble maintaining the vertical field. After a few minutes of use, the picture starts to collapse in on itself, eventually it forms a single bright line across the centre of the screen and if we're lucky it turns itself off.

We bought a new shiny Philips LCD a couple of weeks ago, but it was supposed to come with an digital tuner and it didn't so we sent it back. Now we've been putting off getting a new one because it's that time of year when everyone brings out their new models. If we wait a few more weeks, we might be able to get one of last year's models reduced to clear.

The LG's look gorgeous, but I think that might be because they all seem to be on a special LG display stand and they're running from High Definition Video Feeds. Everything else on the shop is showing some rubbish DVD from a massive splitter somewhere in the store-room. It's hardly a fair comparison and although I think the LG is probably pretty darned good, I don't want to be taken by surprise.