A truckload of dung
Published on March 7, 2008 By Benmeister In Life Journals
Waiting...

My new Samsung 52” LED DLP HDTV is awaiting pickup at FedEx but it won’t fit in my Accord and my wife has the SUV. It’s been some six months since I started looking at HD TVs. It was tough for me to fathum shelling out over $1000 for a TV. After probably a dozen trips to Best Buy, Circuit City, Sears, and a few other stores, I still had a hard time justifying the cost. All the models I wanted were over $2000 and it seemed like all of them, when you watched fast motion, looked horrible. There were big square blocks when the image rendering couldn’t keep up. DLP TVs were a big improvement, but you have to replace the bulbs every two or three years. Then I found out about the LED DLPs that have the performance advantage but no bulb to replace. The only drawback was the viewing angle isn’t as wide as the other DLPs but who’s going to watch a TV at a sharp angle anyway. Nobody but my wife’s brother when the family gets together, and he’s an idiot.

So I finally took the plunge last weekend. I got a good deal on Amazon with free shipping and no taxes. Now my TV is waiting for me at the FedEx. And my wife is out of town with the SUV. And so I post on JoeUser to kill time.

Ode to my TV
MY heart aches for my TV,
A drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
As my TV sits alone, without my watch.
One minute past, now another,
O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been
Cool'd a long age in the deep-delved earth,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
While I await my TV.

Comments
on Mar 07, 2008
LOL.

We have a Samsung LCD. I want to say it's 42"? It's on a boat between Hawaii and the mainland right now.

I'm sure my husband feels your pain. He loves his TV.

Even though it's expensive (sounds like you did a good job comparison shopping), if you like movies or video games, having a decent TV is really worth it.

You don't have any friends with trucks?
on Mar 07, 2008
All my friends have regular jobs.

I love working from home.
on Mar 08, 2008
What a difference!

I picked up the TV around 7PM, brought it home, and got it hooked up just as the pizza arrived. Man, what a difference watching a movie on that compared to my old CRT TV! We watched the movie We Own the Night with Robert Duvall, Mark Walberg, and Joaquin Phoenix. Not a great movie but entertaining. The action scenes were amazing on the big screen!

So now we need to upgrade our cable to get a digital signal. They have on-demand HD movies, which may be more cost effective than buying a Blueray player at this point. You don't get the special features that way, though, and sometimes those are more entertaining than the movie.

We also need a new TV stand. The old one way too small. Well, I'd better make some money.
on Mar 08, 2008
my own tv died, about 4 months ago, and we've been watching on a little 15 inch telly. talk about how size does matter. Now, whenever I go to somebody's home that has a tv greater than that size, I'm in awe.

52!

Lovely.
on Mar 09, 2008
It seems that either my cable company made a mistake or digital signals are free with basic cable. I ran the auto setup and now we get well over 100 channels -- most of them digital and some HD. Since all stations are reqired to broadcast in digital beginning next year, this is probably the transition phase, which explains why we're now getting a lot more channels.

While surfing the channels we came across the Clint Eastwood movie In the Line of Fire and watched it for about an hour, but then the picture froze and then went blank. A few minutes later after returning to that channel was the message "this signal has been scrambled."