In my formative years during the 70’s and 80’s, one of my favorite television shows was the Beverly Hillbillies. I just loved the sheer excitement and wonder exhibited by Jed, Granny, Ellie Mae and Jethro as they discovered a modern luxury unknown to them in the back woods of Hillbilly Ville. My family experienced a touch of backwoods wonder this week as we embarked on our High Tech adventure as participants in the Sony DigiDad project. You can read all of the gushy details about the project here.

Our first adventure was the Connected Living Room project, which tasked us with setting up and enjoying a 40-inch Bravia HD Television and a Sony Blu Ray disc player. From the moment we unboxed the behemoth, the entire family was in love. Thanks to the world-wide-web and HULU, our family logs the majority of our viewing time via the computer. So, the 40-inch man-child of a television replaced a 23-inch relic from the past that I purchased while in college back in the late 80’s.

I’m not kidding, our family television is older than most college sophomores. So you can imagine my kids delight when they actually saw Spongebob in all his glory. A 2-foot tall bright yellow sponge is something to behold certainly after thinking he was the size of a postage stamp. I must admit, bigger is better when it comes to televisions and this Bravia is big.

The thing that interests me the most about the Sony DigiDad project is the overall objective, which is to foster family activities through the use of these specific entertainment products. On the surface, it may seem odd to include a television as a means to gather a family together and enhance interaction, but if you choose your programming wisely, it can be successful.

Like Christmas in August, we began our family adventure by opening the goodies together, opening the Bravia first. The unit is fairly lightweight, was easy to assemble and is aesthetically appealing. It looks very sleek in our living room, which interestingly enough, is furnished mostly with heavy iron, antique wood, stone and tile. The actual configuration of the television’s brain, as well as the installation of the Blu-ray disc player, was incredibly easy. It took me about 5 minutes using the “Easy Set Up” mode and this is significant, on account of the magnets in my head. To my delight, a few clicks here, a few clicks there, and we were off and running.

Only recently has my oldest son become interested in watching sports, so I was quite pleased to discover that the Little League World Series was just getting started and a team from Texas was in the mix. My son and I whipped up some hotdogs, broke out the sodas and commenced to enjoy our national pastime. The picture quality on the Bravia LCD HDTV is tremendous, you could see individual blades of grass, grains of infield dirt and acne on some of the faces of the young ball players. HD is not kind to pubescent youth. Baseball is a game of vigorous activity followed by periods of sloth, so it is very conducive to conversation. My son and I thoroughly enjoyed our time at the ballpark, even though we never left the living room.

Next up was movie night. We invited a whole passel of friends over to watch “Earth,” one of Disney’s latest DVD releases. This flick would give us a chance to critique the Bravia’s ability to deliver high quality HD images because the cinematography in this film is exquisite. We gathered our herd, ate some spaghetti, snuffed down cones of ice cream on the back deck and cranked up the movie. No one was disappointed. The beauty on the screen mesmerized the kids and the adults were jazzed to have an actual dinner of uninterrupted adult conversation. The Bravia and Blu–ray did a fine job.

After the film, as little one’s began to nod and tired families trickled home, I attended to clean up detail. Stepping out the back door with a bag full of trash I luckily spotted a 2 1/2 foot long western rattlesnake, right under my foot. I was wearing flip-flops!

The snake and I tussled. I won.

My face-off with the rattler occurred right after we had viewed the Earth movie, and so my children witnessed one more interaction between the hunter and the hunted. They watched through the kitchen window, and my wife swears it was only slightly more life-like than the images from the Blu-Ray disc on the Bravia television.

Check out these post mortem pictures of the nasty fella that I snapped using the Sony DSLR-A 330. As you can see, I went a little over board on the chopping, but, it was dark and I wanted to make sure he was really dead.

I’m not a professional photographer and so will not critique many of the bells and whistles found on this machine, but for my needs, this camera is quite capable. My main objective is taking good shots of the family and the occasional pit viper that I slay and my first impressions of the 330 are favorable. It is fairly compact, light as a feather and lends it self to traveling, which is important for families on the go. I really like the movable view finder and was pleased with image clarity as well as a very responsive auto setting. While I don’t mind asking for directions to a backwoods rib joint, I hate reading technical manuals and so was thankful to discover that I could decipher the basics of the camera just by use. We have captured some beautiful pictures of our family activities, as well as the requisite portraits of our 8-week-old little boy!

After downloading the photos of the snake to the VAIO FW series laptop, which is part of the package, we displayed the images on the Bravia HDTV through the HDMI input. Very scary. While both kids enjoy using the Bravia as a monitor for the laptop, of the four pieces of equipment reviewed, the VAIO was the most difficult for me to operate (I turned to the Mac side several years ago). It boasts a nice big screen and large keypad, which was especially easy for little fingers to navigate, but it often freezes during game play and the set up wizard just will not leave me alone. I used him in the beginning and sent him away, but he just keeps pestering me. No I don’t need your help! It may be my magnets again, but I’m not so sure.

As a final grade I’m giving the gear the following:

Bravia VE5 1080 P Eco LCD HDTV: A

Sony Blu-ray Disc DVD Player BDP-s560: A

SONY DLSR A-330: A

VAIO FW Series Laptop: C+( I’m giving it a make up exam on the next project)

Check back soon for my next high tech adventure.

This post is part of series called the “Sony DigiDads Project” by Sony Electronics where a group of dads, including C.C. Chapman, Jeffrey Sass, Max Kalehoff, Michael Sheehan, and Brad Powell, have been given the opportunity to test and review Sony gear. If you want to know more about this project, head on over to my first post (link to post) about it or visit the Sony Electronics Community.