My New Toy

For the last year or two, we have been toying with the idea of buckling under and buying a flat-screen TV. But it's only in the last month that I started doing serious research. Here's what I found:

If your screen is under 50 inches, the difference between 720p and 1080p is vanishingly small. We ended up going with a 40 inch for our family room (which, while not small, is set up in such a way that the TV and couch are only 8 feet apart.) I was a bit worried that the 40 would be too small. My worries were baseless. The 40 inch is very sizable and perfect for the room. The 46 inch truly would have been a bit too big.

I do not like the color on the Sony TVs. Something about it is a bit neon, a bit oversaturated and artificial. I love the color on the Samsungs.

After much back and forth, we settled on wanting a Samsung, not caring about 1080, and perfectly happy with a 40 inch and not a 42 (Samsung doesn't make an LCD 42, and as our family room is bright, with a big slider to the backyard in the back, a plasma would have far too much glare.)

We ended up with the Samsung LN40A450, which seems to be being clearanced. We got ours for $698 at 6th Ave.

Set up was a breeze. We picked up a very cabinet on floor sample clearance at Fortunoff, which made dealing with the wires and such easy. One HDMI cable between the cable box and the TV. Another between the TV and DVD player. And the output audio RCA jacks from the DVD player to the stereo. The cabinet even has doors for the speakers, so they are nicely tucked away. It also has an iPod dock on the top, with a cable that also goes to the stereo. No more tape adapter to play the iPod.

So far we have watched a few Dexter episodes on DVD, and the quality is great. As is the HD channels we've watched (mostly news.) I can't wait for new episodes of my favorite shows so that I can see them in HD.

Until Whenever