One of the early Christmas presents I gave myself and my husband this year was an HDTV. Unlike Jessica Simpson, who says in a DirecTV commercial, "I totally don't know what that [1,080i] means, but I want it," I've been talking and writing about high-definition TV since I first saw Japan's HDTV demonstration--not in digital, but in analog--more than 20 years ago.

My colleagues and I have chronicled for this newspaper all the trials and turbulence behind the development of U.S. digital HDTV technologies, including the advent of an underlying video compression technology that enabled the transmission of digital TV signals, the byzantine politics of TV spectrum and 1,080-interlaced vs. 720-progressive-scan resolution formats that pitted consumer electronics manufacturers against the PC industry.

In short, I know this stuff inside out. Or so I thought.

Usually a "slow" adopter when it comes to new consumer electronics products, I figured that the moment was finally ripe for my first HDTV. Further, I felt my desire for an HDTV was justified because I recently moved to New York after five years in Paris, where I got tired of hearing all the characters in CSI speaking French in somebody else's voice. (Besides, terrestrial HDTV broadcast is not mandated in France.)

At an electronics store near my home, I was awestruck by the resolution quality of the large-screen flat panels on display. OK, I go to Las Vegas every January to cover the Consumer Electronics Show, so this shouldn't have come as such a surprise. And yet, when your own wallet is taking a hit, your personal HDTV demo takes on a deeper meaning than a whole wall of CES screens can ever have.

My husband and I quickly homed in on a 32-inch display for our possibly affordable HDTV. First, because I knew some early flat panels had had problems with wide viewing angles, I eyeballed the display from both edges. It looked fine. How about fast-paced motion on a display--like basketball games? Does an LCD panel still suffer from a slow pixel response time? I was glad to find no major smearing or blurring effects on this one.

I turned to a clerk and asked him whether I was looking at pictures in 1,080p resolution. "No," he flatly said. "You are looking at 720p. You can only get 1,080p resolution on a panel larger than 40 inches." Hmm--that was news to me. But, hey, 720p looked darned good.

All right. What about HDMI, I asked the clerk. "No," he said again. "You connect your TV via component video." Wait a minute. We've been writing about the High-Definition Multimedia Interface as the universal digital connector--offering digital audio and digital video in one cable. "You get your TV from cable, right?" asked the clerk. When I nodded, he said, "Well, your digital cable set-top doesn't have HDMI." So, even though I get this beautiful LCD panel with two HDMI inputs, HDMI has no use for me, unless I'm crazy enough to gamble on either HD-DVD or Blu-ray as my main DVD player.

Even after our brand-new 32-incher arrived, we had to wait a few days for the ultimate home HD moment. Of course, I knew that every new TV sold in the United States has to comply with the Federal Communications Commission mandate that by March, all televisions, regardless of screen size, must include a built-in ATSC digital TV tuner, including an 8VSB demodulation chip, so that users can receive free-over-the-air digital TV. But where we live, you've got to have cable. So I didn't bother to buy an antenna. Hence, all the political maneuvering that forced broadcasters and TV manufacturers to meet the U.S. digital TV standard did me no good.

Our HDTV sat on the floor in our empty apartment.

Two days later, the cable guy showed up and connected it with a new set-top. This happened while I was at work. That afternoon, I couldn't contain my excitement when I phoned home. I asked my husband breathlessly, "So, how does our HDTV look?"

He said, noncommittally, "Well, it looks OK." He has always been the Luddite in our household. But how, I wondered, could he not sound excited? I found out when I got home and looked at our HDTV myself. The picture wasn't nearly as good as the display in the store. How come? I spotted the problem. The big dope was watching a non-HDTV channel. I quickly grabbed the remote and clicked beyond channel 701--HD territory.

There! The picture was sharp. The contrast seemed fine. The audio was good. It appeared to have all the redeeming characteristics of HDTV--but wait. What's with the color?

My husband and I patiently worked the color adjustments on our TV--brightness, contrast, hue, tint, sharpness and color temperature, the works. We each tried every possible combination--for days.

As he adjusted and readjusted, my husband noted, "Junko, look at the crime-scene tape!" On our HDTV, the neon-yellow crime-scene tape on Law and Order and CSI was a lovely, understated dove gray. By delicately fiddling with the color controls, we finally injected real color into the crime scene--pink! Just like all those pink cabs in New York City.

I ended up calling our retailer (Best Buy), which diverted me to the display manufacturer (Sharp), which called up a subdivision at a different location in order to find a repair guy in our neighborhood--where a high-tech glitch slowed things down. The repair shop's fax machine was broken. So I had to call the repair guy myself, and got to tell the whole story all over again. They said nobody could come until after Christmas.

Our solution for now--since the TV repairman won't show up by press time--is to look for a channel that shows classic (black-and-white) movies where, instead of compulsively fiddling with the clicker, we can watch Gary Cooper in good old pre-HD analog.

So, bad color on the TV, old movies and waiting for the repairman. The high-def 21st century ends up looking like more and more like the 1950s. Why is it we don't we feel like Ozzie and Harriet?

By Junko Yoshida (jyoshida@cmp.com), news editor for EE Times