Beauty is not something that we would all agree on and I'm sure if I was to show you a picture (in high definition of course) of a spider, most of you would recoil in an instant. However if you collect spiders, or for some unbeknownst reason to me have a particular fascination with them, you'd probably relish the opportunity to gaze upon them in crystal clear detail. Thanks to creative design and an overwhelming increase in the choices now available to us, we can surround ourselves with stunning images, be it in your own home through inspired furniture designs, or on screen with HD ready home entertainment systems. We've moved on from sticking a small TV into the corner of a room and most of us purchase a big TV to use as the focal point in our living rooms - laying out our remaining furniture accordingly. The TV is no longer a large lump of plastic we disguise by placing exaggeratedly large cabinets around it. Instead its design is carefully considered to make it just as attractive as the surrounding furniture we choose to brighten up our homes; the two seem to have entered into a mutual understanding on how our living rooms should look. Technology, along with home furniture design, has progressed at a rapid rate in order to provide us with the most exciting images and psychologically we are all HD ready in terms of welcoming this new wave of technology and design into our homes.
Keeping up with the Jones'
Choosing the latest accessories can be a little tricky in this technologically driven era, but this is by no means something to be concerned about. The biggest dilemma you're probably going to face is 'which design do I love the most?' When you buy a piece of furniture you are wanting something that suits you personally and choosing a quality manufacturer allows you to pick from some of the modern reproduction pieces. Such as Florence Knoll and Josef Hoffman sofas, Charles Eames chairs or maybe you can go for one of those magnificent French inspired pieces. Matching these stunningly selected designs with what appears on your television set requires one specific characteristic over all the others - is it HD Ready? Once you have ticked this box you are free to delve into all the other fabulous added extras and one of the first things you'll probably be considering is adding a top-rate DVD player to pop inside that bespoke cabinet. This piece of equipment is now an essential part of our living room and not having one would be similar to forgetting to buy a sofa for most of us. What's exciting in today's technology market is the diverse range of products we can purchase. Most of us have probably heard of a DVD recorder, but for those of us who aren't ready to jack-in our old DVD collection just yet, consider investing in an upscaling DVD player to boost your old favorite's picture quality to that HD Ready benchmark.
A space odyssey
Long gone are the days were bigger was better. Some people fashion entire careers out of making things smaller and smaller and the items we place in our homes are no exception to this rule - would you still consider carrying that first wave mobile phone? Anyone recall having that industrially strengthened steel TV stand? Furniture has gone along way with TV design and now our flat screen TV sits neatly on a custom made cabinet stand, or mounted against the wall, you can even go as far as putting it inside the wall. We've raced passed the hefty designs and what's much more important to the consumer is that the set is HD Ready! All this previously unheard of terminology has crept into our lives and not having a HDMI cable would be like forgetting to install lighting. You might not have heard of it, but by owning a Toshiba DVD player you're running all those quality audio and visuals through it! Once again it is tying in nicely with our minimalist modern lifestyle as it's just one single cable that provides all that quality. We're quite willing to let everything get that little bit smaller as long as it doesn't compromise on quality - ok, maybe not that King-size bed. Thanks to the miniaturization of everything computers have got smaller and smaller until along came the laptop. We're keen to maximize the space we have available and as of yet, modern design has adhered to this without compromising on quality.
I can see the grass is greener
Being HD ready is part of our lives. Everyone might not always have welcomed it but 99% of people will adopt it - lets be honest we all love watching movies. The only people who I can think of who won't take to having a HD TV is those of us who don't own a TV and never have done - I doubt many of us can think of five people who don't own one. Change is something we are wary of and we might not be too overjoyed at new technological gizmos. Being HD Ready was far from the forefront of my Grandfather's mind and when I bought him a new LCD TV he really couldn't have been more unimpressed. Change is not something overly welcomed in his life and I've sat on the same sofa when I've visited him for more years than I'd care to mention. But once I had removed that old cabinet and placed it on a very modern (maybe too modern) stylish little table, I caught a raised eyebrow; he was attempting to figure out that quality to space ratio. Setting it up took all of 5 minutes and when we finally switched it on, I turned to one of his most favorite wildlife channels and sat on the same chair I've used for X many years. Nothing was said until I left the room and heard my Grandfather say to my Grandmother 'Well look at that, you can even see every blade of grass!
