Knowledge and Thoroughness

I saw my first HDTV at Wescon in San Francisco in 1983 showing Star Wars on closed circuit, and have followed the evolution from analog HD to the current DTV standards. But I’m normally a late adopter of technology because I don’t like paying a premium for the latest gadget, don’t feel the need to impress people or keep up with the Jones’s, and prefer not to be a beta tester.

At year-end, with the demise of analog TV approaching, I started taking a look at how I would migrate to the digital TV world. We get our TV over the air, so one possibility was to acquire a converter box, which would be the cheapest option. But the possibility of getting an after-xmas deal was attractive, so I starting investigating HDTVs to replace our Sony Trinitron. Being a late adopter, I was not attracted to the plasma and LCD flat panels, which are still evolving rapidly, and which have limited lifetimes. Also, many of the flat panel HDTVs are bigger than my 36 inch wide TV cabinet in the den, and our viewing distance is ideal for a 30 inch TV. And we use our walls for hanging art, so light-weight isn’t important to me. CRTs, after a century of engineering still have the best picture quality, and being near the end of their life are priced right. But they are getting hard to come buy — there weren’t any on the floor at Fry’s Electronics.

A web search led me BestBuy, which still had some Samsung TX-T3093WH TVs for less than $500, though they are not going to stock them in the stores any more. Still, I wasn’t sure how good my broadcase reception would be with the outside aerial antenna. But I knew that I didn’t want to move to cable and pay extra for HD reception. So I was pleasantly surprised to find my digital broadcast reception was superb. In fact I now have many more video options available since so many stations are broadcasting on their digital sub-channels.

The TV was easy to set up and the picture is great!

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Entertainment, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.