It's tax time again and while the state took me to the woodshed the Fed is kickin back enough for Mr. and Mrs. Leslie to do our duty for economy and buy a new TV.

Not just any TV mind you, With the local cable company now offering HDTV, the time has come to leave the old world of 4:3 behind and go whole 16:9 hog.

What the Hell am I talking about you ask.. Well let me back up...

This is going to be a trick since this is the stuff of very technical debates among AV geeks but here's the very simple jist of it all. Back in the day..I mean way back in the day, when movies were projected it looked like all the action was happening in a box that looked a bit like a square. When TV came along, it used the movie screen as the template the TV screen. Now the studios, losing it's audience to TV responded by developing about 5 different "widescreen" formats to bring folks back to the movies with nmes like cinemascope, and panavision, These new formats wouldn't fit on a tv screen unless they were letterboxed. Letterboxing showing the full frame of the movie as if you were at the theater but much smaller on your tv with 'bars' on the top and bottom of the screen (which most tv watchers hated) or 'reformatted' to fit the tv where the image on the tv was a portion of what was on the screen (pan and scan which is the scorn of movie geeks around the world).

Now with the change to High Def TV, broadcasters are now following the movies again and going to a widescreen format with an aspect raito of 16:9 (OK one tech term. Sue me then look it up).

So what does this mean for you? Well aside from allowing you to see your widescreen DVD much much better (on most you'll get bars but not even noticable) , the new 16:9 standard will become more the norm as more shows are shot in HDTV. If you spend more than 50% of your time in front of the tv watching DVD's, then you need to move to 16:9. If you have DirecTV or more than one local station broadcasting in HDTV, you'll want one just because the difference is like going from a black and white set to color when you start watching HDTV feeds.

Til next week, be good