The new high-end LED/LCD, 3D HDTV’s are ruining my old school eyes, but not in a painful way. It is delightfully devious retina ruination, an eye-opening bite of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, like in Genesis. Instead of a snake, however, you are tempted by a remote – four of them, actually. A machine like the Samsung 55-incher is a peek behind the wizard’s curtain, a look up a tragically famous celebrity’s dress. I was blind, but now I see, and what I’m seeing has caused me to question everything I knew about visual entertainment.
When a movie like Public Enemies pours across the screen in such clarity that your nose bleeds from the sharpness, you know you have stepped into the next La-Z-Boy existence, a reality where the old concepts of film and grain and light are altered forever.
Coppola’s re-mastered Godfather films on Blu-ray take on a clarity, lushness and thickness last seen by Gordon Willis (Coppola’s DP) in a dark screening room as he squeezed the film fresh out of the canister. It looks like a completely different movie.
Wrap 7 Klipsch theater speakers tied to a 3-D Onkyo 7.2 channel network receiver around your head and that anger you felt earlier in the day at the office melts into a little puddle under your chair. I am sitting here now, barely able to type these words, as the Corleone Family does their dirty business in the most beautiful images I have ever seen, and I have seen this movie at least a hundred times. Toto, we are definitely not in Kansas anymore. I have no idea where the hell we are, but I like it.
If you’re calculating what such a system will cost, just think about college football in 3-D. Just let that settle in for a few seconds before reading the next sentence. Think about Drew Brees throwing a tight spiral right through your living room, knocking over your beer and peanuts. There is Kobe draining a 3 in 3D from the top of the arc. Unspeakable imagery flows into my face from the screen and unexplainable sounds sneak into my ears from the speakers. It gets better – three years, no interest. A few clicks on my Droid calculator assures me the whole set up costs less than eating fast food for lunch every day. So you get a great TV and feel better while watching it.
There is one drawback: the 3D glasses.
They work like a jacked-up border collie on a sheep farm, but I wear regular glasses all the time, so the idea of wearing two pairs of glasses is not exactly appealing, especially since the glasses I wear every day already help me to see life in 3D. With the digital glasses, I feel like LeVar Burton’s character, Geordi La Forge, on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Perhaps they will eventually have a 3D helmet where the entire visual/sound experience happens right around our heads.
I can see it now. We are all sitting around with our heads encased in brain cancer-causing 3D entertainment. I can’t wait.