Good day to you all. Let me open up by saying that I am not the most financially wasteful person in the world. I will make purchases that I expect to need and will generally wait longer than most to replace or upgrade. In short, if it ain't broke, don't fix or replace it... but I also don't go for the cheapest solution out there, preferring to chose a balance between cost and performance. Its a quality that I retain from my father... but on to the main story.
Tuesday of last week, my living room entertainment equipment consisted of a Phillips 24" CRT, a Panasonic VCR, a Phillips DVD player, and a standard digital cable box, and I expected to retain that setup for the foreseeable future. By that point however, we (my wife and I) had been experiencing random and occasional "popping" on the TV, where the image would briefly stretch out left and right beyond the screen borders. As the week went on, it began staying stretched, only popping back briefly. It also would distort the image, stretching the top and bottom corners more than the center of each side, so anything that should appear vertical would be contorted. Well, Thursday came around and I decided that we definitely needed to replace our set, and an HDTV would be the obvious choice. Now, I am the Department Manager of Electronics at a Wal-Mart, but given that we are approaching our annual product layout reset, a bunch of sets had their replenishment turned off, so our selection in the required size class of 32" was down to the way-overpriced and the so-cheap-and-unknown-named-that-I-wouldn't-trust-it sets. BTW, the size was limited to the internal space of our existing entertainment unit. Now, one of our other stores in the city was relatively nearby, and I scanned their inventory and saw that they might have some better stock, so I called them up (while on the clock, under the guise of calling for another customer) and was told that they "might" have some, as some skids in their backroom blocked the view of a certain area where some sets might be. On that chance possibility, I decided to bus there after work, unfortunately they had virtually the same selection as me. I was just about to give up, when I remembered that there was a Future shop right next door to that branch.
So I went in, asked for the 32" TVs. I saw a few good deals, but unfortunately only one had an S-Video port... a Phillips 3000 series, 720p. Now, I'd had good experience with Phillips, and the price was actually better than Wal-Mart had been advertising, so I bought it, brought it home via taxi and had it set up within a half an hour. That Saturday, my wife noted that the first three of her Harry Potter films were in full-screen, and expressed a desire to replace them with widescreen versions to take advantage of the new set. I suggested to her that she might want to replace them with Blue-Rays, since we'd obviously be replacing our DVD player (likely before the end of the year) and it would be best to buy into the newer technology... also, they were only $15 each and came with a collectable T-Shirt. Well, the next day she was at work (we both work at the same store... I work almost exclusively weekdays and she mostly weekends) and asked me what our best price/value Blue-Ray player was. I told her that it was an LG unit on for $89, regular $98. Well that night, doesn't she come home with the player, Harry Potter 1-3 on Blue-Ray, and an HDMI cable. So that night we watched the first movie and reveled in the augmented detail. I however, was thinking about now I wished I'd gotten a 1080p TV instead, so to take advantage of the full quality available on Blue-Ray. By the end of the day on Monday I had decided that we'd pack-up our Phillips unit and exchange it for something better. I called them first to make sure they had something worthwhile in stock, though I had to settle for their in-house brand of "Insignia", which I was told had an LG-manufactured screen. I was however, attracted to the 120hz and LED (LCD screen with LED backlight) and 80000:1 dynamic contrast ratio, so I decided to go for it. I would be sacrificing the S-Video port, which was how my Digital Cable box was able to connect at its best (also supporting RCA), but we had already decided that we'd upgrade to HD Cable in late July, just after I got my annual raise. Unfortunately, there was some confusion in that when I asked if it had an RCA input, the tech guy heard VGA. As it was, we'd already exchanged the television and gone shopping at the Wal-Mart (which had become a Supercenter the day that I shopped for the first TV) by the time I realized that there was no RCA inputs. I checked back with Future shop again before we went home and confirmed my suspicions, that the one and only Component input didn't double as an RCA input, as I'd seen on a few Samsung TVs. It was then that we decided that we'd have to bite the bullet and go for HD cable as soon as possible, or spend the next few months watching TV through a grainy image looped via coax through our VCR.
The next day, I made plans to get home after work ASAP, grab the cable box and rush off to the nearest Rogers store and upgrade to HD cable. I'd also observed that both the Phillips and the new Insignia had poor sound quality compared to our old CRT. This is due to the fact that the old set had outward-facing speakers, while the widescreen sets had their speakers on the back, intending for the sound to be reflected off a solid surface close behind the set, but our current entertainment unit being designed for a CRT, had a large empty space behind, so it was sounding all muffled and tinny. Now there wasn't any RCA audio outputs on the Insignia, or a digital coaxial, having instead only a Optical port. Now, I had no intention of shelling out another couple hundred dollars for a sound system compatible with the Optical, but I did see that it had a heaphone hack, so before leaving for home, I picked up the last of an old 3-piece speaker system that had been kicking around since Christmas 2008, and got it at a significant discount. So just as our favorite Tuesday night programs were starting (NCIS & later, LA), I was installing the speakers and the HD box was already set up.
So here I am, gone in about a week's time, from running completely on legacy hardware, to an almost completely up to date home theater system, and it all kinda snowballed. Fortunately, it's all set up and done, and there should be no more unplanned upgrades, its not the end of the purchases however, as now we're going on a DVD-to-Blue-Ray upgrade spree. Fortunately, there were a number of Blue-Rays on sale presently, so I picked up about six moves, not including the Harry Potter series, for prices of about $10 each or better.
All this is fortunate timing however, as we will each get 3 paychecks this month compared to the usual 2 (it happens twice ever year) and we also will each receive (tomorrow) a large profit-sharing check, the biggest one I've ever heard of a Wal-Mart store ever granting its employees. Unfortunately, between the TV/Blue-Ray Player/HD-Cable/Speakers/BR-Disks and the PC upgrade I did at the beginning of the year, most of that bonus money (at least on my end) is already spent. Here's hoping that the bedroom TV doesn't go poof on us.
Thank you all for your attention and I hope you all garner some insight from my experiences.
