I have seven TVs in my house. Seven; a 60 inch plasma mounted to and cabled through the wall in the great room, a 42 inch LCD in an armoire in the master bedroom, a 36 inch floor model tube TV (in its own luxurious pressed-board, faux wood-grained cabinet) in the living room, a ridiculously heavy 32 inch tube TV in the guest bedroom, a 15 inch tube TV in my office, a 13 inch tube TV mounted on an extendable arm and platform in the gym, and a 12 inch tube TV in the basement. They’re all functional. How many do I watch? 1; the one in the gym and only while on the treadmill, so, what, 30 minutes a day? My wife watches the one in the bedroom exclusively.
Anyway, after realizing that I could almost go into business selling TVs, it dawned on me that I will probably never buy another TV in my life. I get most of my media from online sources these days, and don’t even bother with DVDs anymore. In fact, I believe it’s been over 2 years since I’ve watched anything on DVD.
I can see myself getting rid of all my TVs within 5 years and not missing them at all, not because I’m not desirous of entertainment, but because there are better, easier, more efficient, and cheaper ways to get it. I remember this same feeling of almost palpable evolution when ATMs became widely available or, more recently, the demise of the VCR.
How many of you feel, as I do, that you’ve probably purchased your last TV?
No, but that’s because I’d rather watch movies at home on a television than on a computer. I’ll buy a new TV when my current one dies, then won’t buy another until it dies.
My computer is hooked up to my 40" LCD. I do use the TV tuner for football and baseball (when it’s on broadcast TV) so I still need a TV not just a monitor. I also use it for the Wii.
I just got rid of the 15" CRT in my bedroom. I haven’t used it in maybe 4 years. Realized I was wasting time dusting it.
I don’t watch my LCD TV much actually. I use my laptop in my bedroom and stream video from the computer hooked up to the TV (essentially a media center/server).
I don’t think I’d ever get rid of them 100% but I have pared down yes.
I’m not done buying TVs, even though I don’t watch much these days. We have a 60" plasma in our family room, which we like to use to watch on-demand movies and get, as others have mentioned, “the theater experience.” I would like to have an even bigger one (maybe a 70") when the prices come down and this one starts to fail. Or maybe a 3D model once they get the bugs well and truly worked out of the no-glasses versions.
No TV here, for going on 3 years; we just watch shows and movies on our various devices.
I would like to get a big screen TV for movie viewing but every time we think of doing it we just put our money into better laptops instead. The only problem with viewing on a laptop is it is hard to gather the whole family around. A TV would allow for more group viewing.
I haven’t really used TV service since 2004. I bought cable a couple times during that span, but both times I cancelled it again due to disuse. When I moved a couple months ago I didn’t even arrange a place to have a TV in the new house. There are a couple tube TVs stored in the garage, I keep them in case I decide to hook the Wii back up to one sometime.
I hope pico projectors are worth buying when it comes time for a new one. I love my projector (100" screen). More projectors are in my future if I don’t buy another TV.
There’s a biggish flatscreen used for watching DVDs exclusively. I have a big old fashioned tube TV in the living room, a small one in the kitchen, and a huge hulking Magnovox that must be 20 years old in the basement. I watch the latter three sporadically and when the living room TV goes, I’ll buy a same size flatscreen. I would never watch a movie or TV show on the laptop, I have bad enough eyestrain as it is. I’m given to understand movies on the computer can be viewed on a TV, eliminating cable or satellite, but since that’s all a mystery to me, I’ll just go with what I know.
I don’t want to hijack this thread, but how do you hook up your computer to your tv? I’ve got a 15 inch laptop that I’m using right now, is there a way that I can hook that up to the plasma?
They just plug right into most of them usually through an HDMI or VGA cable. Look at the back. Almost all newer TV’s have PC input conections. A laptop may or may not give you give you the best results. I have desktop with a true video card and blazing fast FIOS connection hooked up to mine and you can’t tell if a given movie is coming from HBO on cable or Netflix via the internet. Slower connections with a computer that doesn’t have a video card may give you a less than ideal experience.
My main TV is a 32" inch LCD and it doubles as my computer monitor although I should really say the reverse based on the use each purpose gets. The old prestige factor used to be how many clunky TV’s and other assorted electronic devices you could pack into a house. At least one setup per room was a good goal. Now the trend seems to have reversed so that the ideal is to have one really good setup that can do everything from watch TV to surf the web to provide dance club quality sound in the smallest package possible (excluding the display itself). Semi-invisible units in secondary locations fill in the rest.
I wish I’d bought my last TV. My one (a Philips LCD) has developed a weird fault whereby, after about an hour’s use, the right hand third or so of the screen starts to scramble and eventually turns into static vertical stripes, a very stretched version of whatever the last image on that part of the screen was. Applying the trusty percussive maintenance technique sorts it out for a minute or two but then you have to switch off and let it cool down, or just hope nothing important is happening on the right hand side of the screen. :rolleyes:
We’ve got 6 TVs in the house, altho 2 aren’t even hooked up. The big flatscreen in the living room gets the most use - my husband uses TV to decompress from work. There’s a small flatscreen in the bedroom that’s mostly what puts me to sleep, altho we do turn on the news and weather when getting ready in the morning.
My husband has a 19" CRT set in his workshop and I have a 13" CRT in my studio - I suspect they’re more for background noise than anything. I don’t generally have mine on when I’m working with clay, but when I start decorating the pieces, I like having something to listen to.
The larger of the unused TVs is in the guest room - I expect it’ll be hooked up eventually. The smaller on needs to go away, but nobody wants a tube TV any more.
We’ve got two TVs- one which we use for watching and for playing console games, and the other which I’ve got attached to my desktop computer.
The one on my computer was free, won as a raffle prize at a company Christmas party a few years back. It’s been mostly gathering dust, until I got the idea to put it on my desk. The problem is that it’s only 720p- and so when it’s connected to my computer, I get a much larger screen but a lower max resolution. I’d love to get an actual 1080p TV to use in this situation, but I just can’t justify the purchase.
Still, though- games are beautiful on my computer now, despite the lower resolution.
I have not purchased a device containing a TV tuner with the intent of using said tuner in probably 20 years. It’s been at least 20 years since I’ve connected an antenna to anything. It’s also been about nine years since I’ve bought any sort of CRT-based display.
But, of the nine glowing rectangles in this house, four are things that you’d look at and say “That’s a TV.” Of these, one is a 60" plasma and while it may have a tuner, it’s acting strictly as an HDMI display.
As far as the “convergence” of computers, online content delivery and home entertainment goes, I’ve got that, but it all displays on that 60" along with Dolby / DTS surround and a real subwoofer. I’m just not into watching movies on a 5" screen and listening with earbuds that have no bass at all.
Heck, no. While I don’t watch broadcast TV (although my wife does), I do consume media (but not physical disks). I have three actual television sets in my house, the two desktop PC’s, and a bunch of iStuff. All of the PC’s and iStuff can connect to the Slingbox (i.e., the broadcast stuff from the Dish dish), all of the PC’s and iStuff can connect to the media server (a gigantic hackintosh in the basement), and the hackintosh is also a PLEX client (TV files and movie files) as well as a Blu-Ray/DVD ripper. The stero receiver also has HDMI video for settings and web radio and iStuff control. The hackintosh/PLEX, receiver, and Dish all route through a 4x4 matrix switch for distribution to each of the three TV’s. (With a larger switch, I could route to all eight locations that I wired in the house.)
So, no, I don’t watch TV, but I definitely see myself continuing to purchase TV’s in the future.
You guys must have fancy ass computers. I don’t watch a whole lot of television either (hell, I don’t think mine has even been turned on since Sunday), but I cannot imagine watching all of my movies on my comp, or having someone come over and watch a movie on my crappy little laptop.