FALLING FOR FLAT
I have long surrendered the idea that I know what cool is. After all, I have two
teenage daughters who, although still young, are busy at work turning me into an
old codger. Yes, I scored points with the iPods for Christmas, but that was
clearly a fluke, as I was brutally reminded when I set out to bring the Dell
W4200HD 42-inch plasma TV home for testing. I opened up a cavernous void when I
removed the previous review sample from the living room, a 56-inch rear
projection DLP-based TV. You would think that not having a television in the
living room for over a month would lead two teenagers and a second-grader to be,
say, just a little excited when I brought home another big screen to test.
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The first words out of my youngest girl were “It’s so tiny.” And from my
oldest, “It’s a Dell? I hope there isn’t a PC in there.” Ah, the budding graphic
artist, my precious teenage Mac zealot. But the idea struck me … why isn’t there
a PC in it? Surely it would not be too hard to pack a simple system in this
unit; there’s space after all. I would never call it small, measuring 42-inches
diagonally, although my little Miss PlayStation would, after battling the
Darkness in Kingdom Hearts on a 56-inch rear projection TV.
Instead of an
all-in-one solution to my DVD-devouring, internet-addicted household, we are
given connectors to hook up components in just about every format known to man.
From new to old, the connectors traverse the history of monitor inputs: HDMI,
DVI, SVGA, two component, two traditional composite video, and speaker jacks for
the optional speakers, which can either be attached to the edges of the screen
or placed on snazzy little stands nearby, trailing their beautiful wires to join
the knotted bunch clustered in a tight scrum on the bottom of the screen.
