We recently got a new 46" Sony Bravia, and it took forever to get it set up. (It turned out the HDMI port on the cable box was inop.) The base had to be put together, then everything had to be plugged into it, then there was the signal issue, then the remote controls had to be set up. If we were using an aerial we would have had to wait ‘up to 50 minutes’ for the TV to find the broadcast signals.
Does anyone remember the old TVs, like in the '70s and earlier? Things were different then. For one thing, this is how you set them up:
[ul][li]Plug the TV into an outlet[/li][li]Attach the antenna[/li][li]Turn the TV on[/ul][/li]Attaching the antenna was the hardest part. You had to use a screwdriver to attach the wires. It was only hard if you had a big TV (TVs were heavy back then) and needed to contort yourself to reach to the back. When I was a kid, TVs had knobs on them; knobs that you had to walk over and physically turn. There was a big knob for tuning to one of 12 VHF channels, and another large knob for tuning to UHF channels (which, where I grew up, had three stations within range). And the knobs had rings around them so that you could fine-tune to the station. Volume? A little knob. And there were other little knobs for colour, vertical hold, horizontal hold, and one or two other things.
In the '70s dad bought a TV with a remote control. It had two buttons. (Yes, young’un; two.) Top button: Press once to turn the TV on. Press a second time to increase the volume. Press a third time to increase the volume again. Press a fourth time to turn the TV off. The other button advanced the channel. It only went forward, but that wasn’t a problem since there were only 12 channels.
When I was a kid, a 20" TV was a Big Deal. Twenty freakin’ inches diagonally! :eek: Only the posh folks had a 24" screen. And 20" was good enough for me in my apartment in the '80s and '90s. I only bought a 26" LCD TV in 2006. Comparing the 20" CRT, the 26" LCD, and the 46" HD LCD, I like the 46" most.
And speaking of screens, I remember when we moved back to the States when I was four, we got a new TV. It was a piece of furniture; a big cabinet you could use as a table. The CRT was round. Only it was masked at the top and sides, resulting in that curved-sided oblong shape that TV Guide used on their logo back when people actually bought (and needed) TV Guides. The inside of the TV was full of vacuum tubes. Old-fashioned as it was, it was not B&W. I did have – and still do, somewhere – a 9" Hitachi portable TV that’s B&W. It’s exactly like this one.
‘Back in the day’, TVs were heavy, expensive, and had relatively small screens. Today they can be huge and relatively inexpensive, light enough to be picked up by a single person (instead of two or three for the console sets of yesteryear), have amazing pictures and sound, and a zillion channels. (Note to Pink Floyd: You’ll need to update your ‘thirteen channels of shit on the TV to choose from’ lyric.) But the old TVs sure were quicker to put into operation.
I like living in the future.