Hence why we put surge protector cords on all of our plugs with electronic contraptions.
I got mine in 2014. I don’t watch much scheduled broadcast TV besides live sport and if there’s something that catches my eye to pass the time. I do have a very old DVD player that was purchased cheaply but is great to play old movies I download and burn onto a disc. It’s mainly for family viewing where we watch the films. There are a lot of great classics free to download and I’m not going to tell my kids to come gather round the laptop.
Our main TV is a Panasonic TC-P50ST30. It’s a 50" 1080p 3D plasma HDTV with Wi-Fi. Within a year, the plasma TV market was gone, thanks to the cheaper (cost/quality) LCD TVs. We’ve acquired several other smaller TVs for different rooms in the house. The last one within the last six months for the home office (because of teleworking and COVID) is a Samsung 32 inch.
The older Panasonic visual quality (all these years later) still beats everything.
Lesson learned the hard way.
I won a flat screen from a radio contest in 2012. It got broken that November, and I replaced it at a Black Friday sale at Living Spaces, so 8-9 years.
I really ought to look into that. Kayla hasn’t expressed much interest in the apartmentful of stuff that I currently live among, and I’ve recently found new love whom I’d move in with in a heartbeat, but her house is already fully furnished.
A perfect example of how you don’t own stuff, your stuff owns you. Cast it all off.
Well, maybe not ALL of it - I find having a few chairs, a table to eat off of, etc. to be of use. I am still paring down my pile, though. It’s hard to give up some things with strong memories attached to them, I am keeping some items because of that, and I do have too many hobbies, but my current goal is to downsize sufficiently everything fits into my current 1 bedroom apartment and small storage unit, then find a 2 bedroom residence and not get more stuff. Or at least minimize the accumulation.
(I might keep a storage unit if I continue to live in an apartment or townhome/condo, but even there my goal is to eliminate the excess so I could get one half the size of my current one - I find having a secure “shed” in which to put seasonal and seldom used items useful enough to justify the modest expense.)
My 40" flat screen TV will be 2 years old in October and it is still in the original unopened box, with the mounting bracket in its original unopened box. In 2020, I moved my old TV out of the living room, to encourage myself to get the “New” TV set up. The old TV is in my office and I haven’t set it up either! (I had planned to watch old VHS and CD shows on the old TV while riding my exercise bike)
The last show I watched on a regular basis was the second season of Lost (in 2005) I would watch severe weather broadcasts and the Olympics. I’m thinking the Olympics in Japan might be the motivation I need to get the Flat Screen TV set up.
I partly agree. A good projector and a big screen are absolutely fantastic for watching movies, no question about it. Combined with a good sound system, you may as well be in an actual theater, except the food is better at home and the popcorn is free, and there is no annoying noisy riffraff.
But it’s not a substitute for an ordinary TV for ordinary TV watching, IMHO. The most blatant factor is that it’s in-your-face intrusive; it’s hard to do anything else like carry on a conversation. It’s problematic for the exact same reason that it’s so impressive when you want it to be impressive. The other factor is that content intended solely for television is often framed in ways that show up best on smaller screens, making it sometimes positively obnoxious on a theatrical-size screen.
I’m installing my first projection system later this week and I’m going out of my way to make sure that all my existing equipment, including my regular TV, continue to work as before. For watching movies, the projection screen will come down in front of the TV, and otherwise will retract into the ceiling-mounted enclosure.
It’s a reasonable point, if tou do that kind of TV watching. For us, we watch maybe two hours of TV per day, and we don’t really talk or anything while we watch. But for other people it doesn’t work.
We bought a house with an unfinished basement, and I used part of it to design and build a custom home theater. It’s sound isolated, acoustically treated jnside, it has a riser for the back row seating, and a stage in front of the screen filled with 2,000 lbs of sand because the main speakers sit on it. I have false walls with acoustically transparent cloth hiding all the speakers. The screen is built into the wall and it’s stretched blackout cloth over a wood frame, I’ve got four sconces on the side walls and a tray ceiling with led lighting. It’s by far my favorite room of the house. Even for reading or napping, it’s great.
Your home theater sounds awesome, and is similar to what a good friend of mine has been doing for a long time. He’s now in his third generation of projector, having just upgraded to 4K and an even bigger screen; his home theater is getting more “theatrical” all the time. He has a sound system in there that cost more than a luxury car.
I have a finished room in the basement but it’s unrealistic for me to try to fit it out as a home theater. I have a really good sound system upstairs in a comfortable family room with a lot of stuff plugged into it, and reproducing all that on a grand scale downstairs would take more money (and effort) than I can spare! If I was rich I’d do it for sure. But realistically, it’s much more practical to fit a projection system into the existing family room, with things like a screen that drops down in front of the TV.
I don’t watch a lot of ordinary TV, either, but I just like to have all my options open at minimal cost.
65" Panasonic plasma TV, purchased 2009, so 12 years old. Best picture at the time. Insanely heavy: the display itself is 180 pounds, and since we didn’t want to mount it on the wall, we bought the stand for it, which weighs an additional 40 pounds. And then there’s the power consumption: it’s image-dependent, i.e. a white image requires more power than a black image, but averages maybe 500-600 watts (modern LCD displays of this size are more like 100-200 watts).
Still seems to be working good. Not equipped with modern "smart TV’ features, but we’re fine with that. Got a TiVo and an Amazon FireTV stick, getting plenty of content.
55" Sharp Aquos, bought about six years ago. Still working perfectly, although I have to reboot it every few months or so when there’s a glitch. 1080p, not 4K. It’s a smart TV, but by the standards of 2014 or 2015. Apps are very primitive by today’s standards, and new apps aren’t available. Content is through old fashioned cable TV (Spectrum; we live in a hilly area with no OTA television reception, except for a single translator from a Fox affiliate), and a Roku stick plugged into one of the HDMI ports for Netflix, Amazon Prime, and the like. Sound is through a Pioneer bookshelf stereo. (I got rid of the separates and floor speakers a long time ago.)
My living room TV is a Samsung 42" plasma that I bought in 2006. I paid $2000 (!) for it which was one of my most extravagant purchases, but it’s been a great TV.
It has a lot of ports on it, and decent sound. The blacks are really black, like an OLED screen. I never had burn-in issues. The picture still looks really good (after fears that plasma TVs would only last 5 or 10 years) but the resolution is lacking and I sort of wish it would die so I could get a 55", but I would like something like an OLED which is still rather expensive.
Doing the math $2000 divided by 15 years is $133 per year, that’s not a good value at all when you can get decent TVs for $350 now.
3 year old TCL 65" 4k Roku TV. $450 at Wal-Mart for a black friday sale 3 years ago. Love the Roku built into the TV. Love the 4K movies on NetFlix and other provider, although I am sure it would be better with something like an OLED TV. For the money, can’t be beat.
Snap. Same size and type, same plans and thoughts regarding replacement.
42” at the time wasn’t the ‘max’ but it was seen as probably the best value.
Ours fits in a nice shelving unit that only just accommodates it anyway. If we had to replace the TV, we couldn’t increase the size past about 46” so anything bigger means extra expense for the ‘infrastructure’.
Should you ever get a tv again, you may benefit by putting a bias light behind it. It really helps my tv stabilize in my field of vision, rather than what I would describe as “sloshing around” when it’s the only bright thing in the room, especially at night.
If you’re wondering if OLED is really worth it, I believe it is. I love movies and concurrent with my home theatre setup, the OLED is much better than the plasma it replaced, both in picture quality and in high level light situations (something the plasma always had issues with).
Even day to day tv viewing and streaming are better overall. Also, HDR and Dolby Vision are the bomb.
About 10 years. I had to do some persuading to get Typo Knig to agree to get one as a whole-family gift that year - prior to that, our “big” TV was a 19 inch cathode ray TV I’d bought in 1991. That one went upstairs to our bedroom to replace a 13 incher.
We got a second flat screen in 2013, for the master bedroom. I think we still have that 19-inch TV in the basement in the room we keep the treadmill in; a friend is renting the basement so we don’t use either of them…
We could get a larger TV with better resolution now for about half the cost of that first flat screen.