I bought a big-ass (42"), kick-ass TV recently, a Samsung. If you're looking for a great plasma panel TV, you can't go wrong with the Samsung line. They feature a 1024 x 896-pixel resolution (great for HDTV and use as a computer monitor), dynamic image enhancement with noise reduction and color adaptation to your taste, simulated surround sound, picture-in-picture, burn-in protection, and much more. The image quality is just amazing! Wonderful, rich colors, sharp image, just great. Far better than any LCD TV I have seen so far, and with a 60,000 hour life, you can watch TV for six hours a day for 27 years before the screen finally gives up.
To top it off, I also purchased a kick-ass multimedia PC (which I haven't installed yet, unfortunately) to turn the TV into a full-scale digital entertainment system, and a Philips home cinema to get to that full cinematic experience. This setup, in combination with Star Wars III, makes the whole house tremble!
And the really amazing thing is, this whole lineup of kick-ass entertainment technology is available at roughly 2/3 the price of a year ago: just € 1800 for the TV, € 1000 for the PC (dual-core Pentium and full multimedia capabilities including a dual TV tuner, hard disk recorder with delayed viewing, a dual-layer DVD burner and a second DVD-ROM drive, yeah!) and € 300 for the home cinema. It's cheaper than a Team Foundation Server license ;-)
David Boschmans of Microsoft fame is organizing the fourth Belgian Geek Dinner at the Serenata in Zaventem, near Brussels. The previous geek dinners were really great so expect more of the same: great (although mostly geeky) conversation, colleague architects and developers from all over the country, great food and an informal setting. You shouldn't carry any weapons but lightsabers are allowed.
This edition even has two special guests: none other than Robert Scoble and his wife Maryam. Robert is a well-known blogger about all things Microsoft (and related) and is a Technical Evangelist at the Redmond campus.
See you there on Thursday, 8 December 2005 at 6:30 PM!