Window Shopping

Sometime before Christmas, we began a discussion about purchasing a flat screen TV. The events that led up to this conversation all centered around a very heavy, mahogany  cabinet which houses our old 21 inch TV.  The cabinet is a two piece thing and the top alone takes three men with muscles of weight lifters to move when the need arises.  We (translated "I") purchased it in a thrift shop about seven or eight years ago because the wood is lovely, and because it has doors to hide the electronics away. However, the doors are rarely closed, and it is not easy when we want to move the TV to another part of the room. It's time for that cabinet to go.

The TV, too, is a rather weighty item. The thing is not easy to transport, as it's a slippery, metal box with no handles anywhere. It would be fine if it could just sit somewhere and never need to be moved, but we find that we're moving it quite often. If our cable doesn't function correctly, the company's answer is to reset it by unplugging it from the TV and the wall recepticle, and then replugging. That means fighting with the television to get access to the back of it. Arg! I've had enough, and I guess my husband has too.

So, we began to explore the idea of a flat screen. They're lighter can sit atop a less bulky cabinet or table. Because we're not up on all the technology today, we've read everything we can get our hands on regarding these new-fangled machines. My husband even bought a subscription to Consumer Reports, in order to get their take on things.  We finally decided to go to some of the stores and check out the TVs, armed of course, with the Consumer magazine and a headful of numbers and questions.

We would look only at sets with numbers like 1080 and 120 HZ and fully HD.  Easier said than done. Oh, they are there....but they are attached to screens the size of a drive-in theater and cost much more than we want to spend. I don't happen to want a 42" screen in my living room. I don't want to hang it on my wall either. I also want a clear picture ...with no 'ghosts' following an action shot, which is more likely with a 60HZ than a 120, the speed of reset, apparently. We do not want a plasma...we want an LED, rather than an LCD, as the latter will soon be phased out. 

January is apparently the month to buy a flat-screen TV. The Christmas sales are finished and the stores are attempting to clear the floors of the lower-priced models, so that they can raise the prices again for Superbowl watchers.  Time is drawing near, and the sales will soon end.  I'm thinking that we're going to lose out on this year's flat screen TV sales.  Maybe we'll try again next year, but I fear that by then, we'll have to have new numbers, letters, model ideas, sizes, and information. 

I wonder how many more years we have left in this cumbersome old model?