Television Upgrade

Ken — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 16:37:26 +0000

Well, I've bit the bullet, and decided not to wait for a Black Friday deal: I'm finally ditching my old behemoth rear-projection TV for an LCD flat panel model. (Amy will be enormously pleased to recover some square footage in our living room.) Sony has a promotion going on right now: discounted TVs along with a free Playstation 3. I'm not terribly interested in having another game console to suck down my time and money, but the PS3 is one of the best Blu-Ray players available, so it's worth it just for that.

Nice things about the new TV, as compared to my old one:

Won't suffer from color convergence drift (color fuzzing that results from the color beams being misaligned, requiring periodic refocusing)
Won't have odd red lines (Trinitron artifacts?) crossing the screen (this developed after a power surge; the lines makes Amy think of the stripes you see in salmon meat)
Better viewing angles (rear projection really had a problem with this)
HDMI inputs and digital audio output, for better integration with my home theater
Occupies ten times less floor space

The only bad thing I can think of is that it doesn't have the picture-by-picture mode that my old TV has, which is far superior to the picture-in-picture mode that the cable box provides.

The TV should arrive in less than a week. Whee, reckless consumerism! I mean... whee, doing my part to stimulate the economy!