I know, it sounds silly, but let me lay it out:
Friday, I go into the local VideoOnly store and purchase a big-screen TV. This is the first step in furnishing the last room in our house, which we want to be our primary movie-watching space. I went in hunting for a Sony KDS-60A3000. They didn’t have any in stock (which didn’t really matter to me, as I have no couch to set in front of anyway), but the salesperson convinced me that for the room size, something a little smaller would be more appropriate. I struggled with the “get a smaller TV” concept, but I had read previously that a 60″ would be about the largest I should get. So, we ended up with a Samsung HL-5676S, a 56″ model. We couldn’t get it into the car (a good sign that I hadn’t settled for too small of a screen), so delivery was set for Sunday.
Okay, back to me catalyzing the end of the format war. Early Saturday morning, someone very high up in Warner Bros. obviously noticed my purchase. Knowing that in about 24 hours, I would plug in a paltry standard-def DVD player into my large screen and be utterly horrified, they decided that they better end the war before I had to bring myself to a format decision. Thanks Warner!
Come Sunday, the TV was delivered. The size seemed fine, and I had gotten over this “smaller TV” stuff. We plugged it in and brought something up before the delivery people left to make sure it worked. Very shortly after that, I noticed that something wasn’t right. If I bring up the TV’s menu (which is a horizontal bar across the bottom of the screen), I see that the entire picture is very clearly rotated counter-clockwise about 2 degrees. We measured the distance from the bottom of the bar to the top of the bezel, and it was at least a half-inch greater on the right side! This was also noticeable on letterbox DVDs and anything that had large horizontal or vertical lines in the picture. What the heck?
I figured that, being a projection screen and all, that there must be an adjustment of some kind for this. I googled for “samsung dlp rotate” and, to my dismay, found only reports of similar issues. Is this some systemic issue with the new slim line of Samsung DLP TVs? With all the other reports, I wasn’t interested in playing swap with the store until I got one that was straight and true. I called the guy at VideoOnly and said I wanted to swap for the Sony. Luckily, VideoOnly is awesome and they took care of it and said I could keep the Samsung until the Sony arrived.
Okay, so my little purchase probably didn’t end the format war, but after looking at the utterly poor image from my standard-def player on the big screen, I’m glad that things may be starting to move on that front. I think I wanted HD-DVD to win, because I don’t like Sony’s obsession with proprietary formats (across all technologies). However, the good news is that either Sony or Microsoft gets screwed either way, so an end in either form seems like a good thing.