Well we did go off and cancel our POTS and DirectTV subscription - so the only logical thing to do was upgrade the home theater now that netflix and redbox are the primary entertainment sources.  So did a bit of shopping. 

Costco had a 37" Westinghouse (LVM-37w3) for $800.  Perfect.  (Costco's return policies rock, so where possible, I'll buy anything with an LCD from them).  Thus begins the first snag.  I've got two televisions in the house - a 19" and 27" Sony I picked up in the early 90's.  I've always lusted after something larger, but I just discovered that my Bride does not share my thoughts on this.  37" is too big, but will be tolerated.   Hmmn.  Guess I should not have thought that 37" might make for a good bedroom sized set and a 60" or so for the main living space.  Land mines ahead - proceed with caution.  I did pick a monitor that does 1080p and has a plethora of connections - so should be sorted when I actually do get a blue-ray/hd-dvd/whatever player someday down the road.

I've actually seen quite a few people on the forums use this as a computer monitor, which makes this very interesting as a media center.  1920 x 1080 on a 37" screen should be quite viewable from the couch.  I'll probably wire together some sort of PC, which means I probably need some sort of wireless keyboard/mouse combo - I have most of the other parts already.  Again, fear and trepidation from the wife.... She is 'concerned' a PC is going to show up in her living room.  I'll accept that challenge - so somewhere in here I'm going to make an invisible HTPC.  I'm pretty exited about that.

Netflix does something a bit interesting - they let you stream movies over the net.  Tried this when I was working in DC last week.  Not sure the resolution will be high enough to make it look better than a youtube video, but that might be due to the crummy net connection I had in the Marriott.  Bonus if streaming actually works at TV resolutions.

I also picked up a OPPO DV-981HD DVD player.  From the forums, it sounds like it does a very nice job up-scaling DVD video to 1080p.  If I find any media that is region locked, it is trivial to re-author the media in software there days.  (I'm a bit surprised my Apex 600A player is still kicking after all of these years.  I suspect it will get donated off to one of my siblings along with one of the CRT's)  First pair of devices that actually has a HDMI connection - hope they actually work well together.

Audio and all that other stuff will need to wait until I know where and what is going to be hooked into this monitor.  Looking for that UPS truck next week.  (grin)