[ # ] Death of an Old TV = New HDTV Here I Come!!!

/* Posted March 17th, 2008 at 1:58pm */
/* Filed under HDTV */

So i was playing Super Smash Bros. Brawl on my old 42″ Sony RPTV on Friday night when it finally kicked the bucket. This TV has been on the verge of dying for the last 2 years I’ve had it in my apartment when i took it from my parents’ house where it’s been in use since 1993.

It was a good sized TV for and great for its time, but something was screwy with the video projector as it would start to make a high pitched squeal after watching for several minutes. You could turn off the TV for a couple of seconds it might go away, but it always came back especially when the screen was very white. You didn’t hear it as much when it was darker. On top of the squealing, the picture would sometimes flicker until there was a red ghost image of whatever we were watching appeared. Again, you could turn off the TV and turn it on and it would go away only to haunt us again another day.

I’ve had problems with this TV before. Had it repaired maybe twice in its lifetime at my parents’ house. I knew it wasn’t worth it to get it repaired again so i’ve been looking to get an HDTV for the past couple of months. Funny how it died because i was playing with my gf on the couch and she said “Do you smell something burning??” and i replied, “Yea… maybe its coming from outside” to which then 30 seconds later, the TV made a popping noise and shut off indefinitely. R.I.P. Sony TV….

Soooooo…. the need for a new TV came quicker than I thought and i’ve been doing HDTV research for a little while now but hadn’t found the one i wanted yet. Price was definitely an issue as i didn’t want to spend more than $1500. Ideally a 46″-50″ would be my 1st preference as 42″ wide screen looked a bit small to me and anything bigger than 50″ was too big for my living room. As far as the LCD vs Plasma debate, i liked the way LCDs worked in any room lighting, but Plasmas generally looked brighter yet had that glare issue. I also heard that you could only tell the difference of 1080p resolution over 720p if you had an HDTV over 50″ so i didn’t mind getting a lower priced 720p TV.

Anyways, we went to Costco on Saturday for some stuff and I browsed some of the HDTVs there. Nothing really caught my eye, although i could really see the difference between some of the low brand Vizios vs the better Toshibas or Sonys. We had some time to kill so we went to our local Best Buy to check out some more HDTVs that we could compare side by side in person. Checking out the massive wall of TVs organized by size, we hit the 46″ to 50″ section where we saw a decent deal on a 50″ Samsung T5054 Plasma at 720p for $1299. Kinda had everything i wanted at a decent price so i asked the sales guy if they had any in stock and they said it was sold out and discontinued.

Sad times until my gf then asked the guy if we could buy the display one and to my surprise he said “Sure. That’ll be $999.” My gf and I looked at each other and then went to check out the TV again for any blemishes or scratches. It looked pretty clean so we made our final decision and bought the TV. A couple of downers were that it didn’t come with a base stand so we had to find a way to mount it or buy a new stand. Then there was the issue that it was used on display for the past year, on for 12 hours a day everyday so we decided to get a 4 year warranty on it. Everything was all set to go, until 15 minutes later when they took it off the wall and while trying to take off the store brackets, they got the bolt stuck in the back of the TV and stripped the screw slot making it impossible to get the bracket off without breaking the TV back or taking it apart. The sales guy barely apologized and sent us to Customer Service to get a refund. It was the last one in the store and we were out of luck.

We left the store empty handed and a little depressed that we missed out on getting our 50″ plasma for 1K… but then we remembered there was another Best Buy 2 miles away! We drove there quickly rushed to the TV section where we saw the exact same Samsung T5054 50″ Plasma in even better condition than the 1st one we saw. The sales guy there said they were out of stock and we proceeded to ask if we could buy the display one. We told them the story of the other Best Buy, showed them the receipt of our returned TV to speed things up and VIOLA!! We successfully got it down and into our car heading to its new home. On top of the new TV, this Best Buy had the TV stand with swinging mount that we wanted in stock so we purchased that as well to mount our new TV onto. My gf also went a little shopping crazy and bought a new 160 gig Ipod classic to put on the new credit account she opened, all which has no interest for 2 years.

Say hello to my little friend:

So i did my research on actually getting the HDTV, but I’ve lacked the time to do any real follow up about all the other HD crap i now need to actually see anything in High Definition. I don’t have any component or HDMI cables. I don’t have a digital cable box with any HD outputs. I don’t have an upconvert DVD or an HD/Bluray player. So basically i’m just watching plain crappy TV and playing my Wii on a huge ass screen.

I’ve been thinking of getting this new Samsung Upconvert DVD player to tide me over until I can afford a PS3 or an HD-DVD player. Looks slick and it matches my new display very well. :-D