The Saga of the 55" TV
Apr. 6th, 2013 10:28 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterSo, over the last few months, I have been keeping an eye on TVs going on sale at Best Buy. I recently came into some money that I was able to spend, and thought I should get myself a better TV than the old Sony Trinitron I had that was taking up a lot of space and a lot of weight on the table at but not really useful to me since I upgraded to my new video card that didn't have a connecting plug for it. So I Freecycled the old TV, and prepared to get a new one. I wanted something at least 46 inches, and preferably the 55 inch one that I knew Insignia made – because I knew that this was the only TV I would be able to have for the next few years, and I wanted the biggest one I could possibly get. Finally that 55 inch LED I wanted went on sale at a really good price, so I went down to the local Best Buy store to pick it up.
When I got there, I learned that the store was entirely sold out of that TV – but the Best Buy store down in Branson still had it. So I called my uncle Denis and asked if he would drive me down to Branson and back. Happily, he agreed, and we had a great time driving down there and back, discussing various things, and eating at Kentucky Fried Chicken on the way home. We got the TV back to my apartment, and I set it up, and hooked it up to the computer, but then I realized there was a problem.
No matter what I did, the television was always about a 10th of a second out of sync with the computer; it lagged behind the computer so that when I moved the mouse on the computer it would always be a fraction of a second before the pointer actually moved on the screen. Not only was this annoying when trying to click and drag things, but it also meant that, since I played sound through my computer's 5.1 surround sound speakers, anytime I watched a movie or video on the TV from the computer, the lip movements would always be out of sync with the speech. The Blu-ray player that I used could actually compensate for this, but it wouldn't do any good for Netflix or YouTube or any other web-based video sources I might watch.
Over the last couple of weeks, I argued with myself over whether or not to take the TV back during the return period. I even went down to the store with my laptop to test it out against the demonstrator of the same TV on display, just to make sure that it was a problem with the model in general, not just my particular set. In the end, I decided it would be better all around to go ahead and do that while I still could – if the TV wasn't going to do the main thing I actually wanted it for, there was no point in spending over $700 on it. So I did that very thing today, with the help of a coworker who drove me down with the TV in tow.
In the end, I'm glad I owned the TV, even for only two weeks – it let me try it out and see what it was like, and if it had worked out, I would've been very happy with it. But on the other hand, that 55 inch television probably was, realistically speaking, too big for my apartment, and I would be just as happy with something a little bit smaller (not to mention cheaper).
Besides, when you get right down to it, I don't really watch that much TV anyway, and I don't really have a good place to sit far back from a bigger screen. So, I have decided to take the money I got back from that TV and put it into making some improvements on my desktop computer that I have been meaning to make for some time. Moving up to a much faster processor and motherboard, and 16 gigs of RAM rather than the four I have now. I'm also getting a 256 gig solid-state drive that should make my computer absolutely fly. I look forward to seeing what that does to loading times, especially of some of the games that I play. I already have a fancy new video card and a new power supply that I purchased recently, so it will just be a matter of taking some parts out and putting other parts in. I look forward to doing that next weekend when I go down to visit my parents – I'm having the parts shipped down to them.
So in the end, I guess the moral of the story is that it's not necessarily always the best to get the biggest and most expensive new thing, and you shouldn't be afraid of taking it back if it turns out not to be what you wanted after all.
When I got there, I learned that the store was entirely sold out of that TV – but the Best Buy store down in Branson still had it. So I called my uncle Denis and asked if he would drive me down to Branson and back. Happily, he agreed, and we had a great time driving down there and back, discussing various things, and eating at Kentucky Fried Chicken on the way home. We got the TV back to my apartment, and I set it up, and hooked it up to the computer, but then I realized there was a problem.
No matter what I did, the television was always about a 10th of a second out of sync with the computer; it lagged behind the computer so that when I moved the mouse on the computer it would always be a fraction of a second before the pointer actually moved on the screen. Not only was this annoying when trying to click and drag things, but it also meant that, since I played sound through my computer's 5.1 surround sound speakers, anytime I watched a movie or video on the TV from the computer, the lip movements would always be out of sync with the speech. The Blu-ray player that I used could actually compensate for this, but it wouldn't do any good for Netflix or YouTube or any other web-based video sources I might watch.
Over the last couple of weeks, I argued with myself over whether or not to take the TV back during the return period. I even went down to the store with my laptop to test it out against the demonstrator of the same TV on display, just to make sure that it was a problem with the model in general, not just my particular set. In the end, I decided it would be better all around to go ahead and do that while I still could – if the TV wasn't going to do the main thing I actually wanted it for, there was no point in spending over $700 on it. So I did that very thing today, with the help of a coworker who drove me down with the TV in tow.
In the end, I'm glad I owned the TV, even for only two weeks – it let me try it out and see what it was like, and if it had worked out, I would've been very happy with it. But on the other hand, that 55 inch television probably was, realistically speaking, too big for my apartment, and I would be just as happy with something a little bit smaller (not to mention cheaper).
Besides, when you get right down to it, I don't really watch that much TV anyway, and I don't really have a good place to sit far back from a bigger screen. So, I have decided to take the money I got back from that TV and put it into making some improvements on my desktop computer that I have been meaning to make for some time. Moving up to a much faster processor and motherboard, and 16 gigs of RAM rather than the four I have now. I'm also getting a 256 gig solid-state drive that should make my computer absolutely fly. I look forward to seeing what that does to loading times, especially of some of the games that I play. I already have a fancy new video card and a new power supply that I purchased recently, so it will just be a matter of taking some parts out and putting other parts in. I look forward to doing that next weekend when I go down to visit my parents – I'm having the parts shipped down to them.
So in the end, I guess the moral of the story is that it's not necessarily always the best to get the biggest and most expensive new thing, and you shouldn't be afraid of taking it back if it turns out not to be what you wanted after all.
