Time To Kill My Brain

Well, after 10+ years of using my dinky little computer monitor as a “TV” (meant to be a temporary measure after my old tube TV broke), I finally have a proper TV again. It’s three weeks late thanks to shipping shenanigans, but I’d rather not dwell on that…

It’s not OLED, which is still kinda pricey, but it is 55″, 4K HDR, and has local dimming, so the quality’s really nice and it should remain futureproof for quite a while yet. I may have to do some calibration, but God of War already looks amazing on it.

Right now I have the cable box, PS3, and PS4 hooked up to it, and I also want to hook up the PC so I can play PC games on it, but I’ll need to get a longer HDMI cable for that. I don’t have the 360 hooked up since I don’t have the right cables (it’s one of the early non-HDMI 360s), and I could hook up the Wii with component cables, but they’re not a priority right now. If I run out of HDMI ports, I have an HDMI auto-switcher so some of the consoles could share a port, if needed.

It also finally let me clean up a whole mess of audio cabling. I used to have to split out the audio signals from all the boxes, route them through a switcher, and then through a PC, resulting in a ton of RCA audio cables and proprietary console A/V connectors strewn all over, but now everything’s just HDMI so all that cabling is gone.

The only quibble so far is that the UI (Android TV) is kinda clunky and slow, it can take up to 5 seconds for some of these menus to come up, but hopefully I won’t have to use it too much. Oh, and the motion smoothing they enable by default is total garbage (Mad Max Fury Road happened to be on TV, and it feels so weird with it enabled), but it’s easily disabled.

Now maybe I’ll actually watch more TV and movies now that they don’t have to fight with the PC…

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