Outside of Super Bowl Sunday, New Years is the biggest time of the year for American football fans. With no ballpark estimates of how many large screen high-definition televisions are sold in anticipation of the bowl games, it’s safe to say the numbers are huge. The annual footballfest brought us today, once again, to ogle our local Best Buy’s offering of gigantic HDTVs. And it begged a big question, regarding the display of HDTVs …

Why is it that some of the plasma TVs look so good while on display, and others look so bad? Are the differences between the different DLP projection units really that pronounced? And what’s with those LCD TVs?

The skeptic in me takes over …

Does the sales staff take the time to tune up the models they want to move? Do they intentionally make some models look bad? Or is that too evil to even contemplate?

It’s positively amazing to see two competing HDTVs next to each other–with the display of one looking crystal clear, and the other looking like it was dragged for fifteen miles down a dirt road.

I’ll invariably wince at the poor display and gravitate towards the crisp model.

Is it just me?

It’s situations like this–surrounded by an overabundance of jumbo-sized HDTV monitors–that make me feel like Homer Simpson (albeit with too much hair, just like in his younger days), as my son does his best to invoke Bart, basking in that plasma glow …

mmmmmm … forbidden HDTV screen gllllll …