I love contests where you can win something actually worth using.  Over at DevDad.com, a site about a Stay at Home Dad, Geek Style, they are holding a contest called the Stay At Home Dad Digital Camera Give-Away and a few other prizes to go along with it.  The camera is a Canon SD750 with 7.1 Megapixels and a large 3 inch LCD.  Since I’m looking for a new camera anyway, I thought I would give his contest a shot. 

continue reading "Who Wants a Free Camera?"

I was over at my friend’s house the other day and asked if he had heard that Microsoft had extended it’s Xbox 360 warranty from 1 year to 3 years.  He asked why, and I told him I heard they were receiving so many complaints about the systems breaking just after the year warranty was up that they had to extend it to take care of the customers.  The ironic part of the story is no sooner had I finished telling him this that his xbox came up with an error message and had 3 red lights on the console lit up.  The message told him to contact Xbox support.

continue reading "Microsoft Xbox 360 Support Website"

The cable company (I have WideOpenWest Cable) came yesterday and switched out the regular DVR for the HD DVR. The box is Scientific Atlanta Explorer 8300 HD. The cable person installed it in about 10 minutes and suggested that I didn’t need in use the HDMI cable I could just go with the Component Cables and it would be the same. I didn’t take her word for it though and decided to compare them myself. I actually think the HDMI Cable did make a difference in picture quality however it was small.

One thing I was suprised about was after the switch the audio is sooo much better than it was with non HD cable. Everything sounds so much clearer and more surround like (it is Dolby Digital Surround). That was definitely a pleasant surprise.

For about $20 more a month, I received an HD DVR and about 20-25 HD channels and they definitely were worth it, at least to me. Watching sports in HD is much more enjoyable.

I’m going to continue to mess around with some of the settings on the Samsung and see if I can’t get the picture to come through even clearer. If I have any luck, I’ll make sure to post it on here.

Well I finally broke down and decided it was time to get into the world of High Definition Television. I just bought an XBOX 360 Elite and was tired of everyone talking about how great it looked in HDTV. It was time to find out for myself.

So over the weekend, I received a $200 coupon from Circuit City and went looking. With a budget of under $2000, there was a large selection of televisions to choose from. The selection of TV’s was further narrowed down because of size limitations in the room it will be placed in, as well as wanting a TV larger than the Current CRT model I had. With those limitations in place, I was looking for a 40-50 inch plasma or LCD.

After reading extensively about the differences between the two, I decided to go with the 40 Inch Samsung LCD HDTV (LN-T4061F). I was looking for numerous HDMI connections, 1080p resolution and a nice cosmetic look and this TV has it all. The final cost was $1994 which was under my budget (barely).

I will be getting HD Cable later this week and will post how it looks. I have hooked up the 360 to it and it is amazing. I’m waiting for the 1080p games to come out, including Halo 3.