Time to talk TV sizes

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So...what's everyone's TV size? What was it before that? Are you happy with it? Pros/cons?

I had a 25-inch square tube TV (you know, the kind with a big footprint) for something like eight years. I bought it for $200-250 way back in, like, 2001 or 2002, and it was fine, and I got a ton of use out of it. But a couple years back, after just getting married, my wife and I took the plunge and decided it was time to buy a Blu-ray player and a TV worth playing Blu-rays on. I didn't go too nuts trying to find a deal; I wanted a well-reviewed TV from a major brand if at all possible, even if it meant paying a bit more. And I found one that was the same price at our local Best Buy as it is on Amazon. It's a 42-inch Samsung widescreen.



We really love it; works as well as it did the day we got it two years ago, and it has lots of nice little features, like turning itself on and/or switching inputs when you put a disc in. And it has USB ports on the side, so I can play random videos. The software to do this is predictable sub-par, but not half as bad as they can sometimes be.

In terms of picture, I'm pretty surprised at how quickly HD became a necessity when watching TV. I don't get a whole lot more out of Blu-ray than I do DVD, even on the larger TV, but the difference between regular channels and HD ones is huge. Now I understand why we see all those competing ads talking about who has more HD channels: it's a big deal.

I'm guessing we'll have almost no one who thinks the TV they got was too big. I was a little worried about that when Courtney and I bought ours a couple of years ago, partially because it was going in a moderately sized bedroom, but now it seems like it would've been pretty difficult to get something too big. We would've had to go 50+ before it started to look really silly.

So, how about everyone else?



The main one in my house is a 32" Toshiba and it's absolutely wonderful and blu-rays look sublime on it. Very happy with it. DVDs also look great as I play them through the multi region blu-ray player too so they are upscaled. At the moment a television size that I would love for films is rather expensive here in the UK. If I won the lottery tomorrow, I'd get one as big as I could fit into the sitting room without looking odd/taking over the room. Oh even maybe just dedicate a spare room and change it to a cinema room lol.



A system of cells interlinked
I have a 50 inch Samsung Plasma. We absolutely love it!




Before that I had a 27" Sony Trinitron, which was also great. However, one day we went and bought Mass Effect 2, and we couldn't read the menus on the Trinitron! On the back of the game, it said "May not display properly on some standard displays."

At that point, it was time for a new TV!

A short aside: I have this weird rule at my house that no electronics can be in the bedroom. Self imposed, or course. I have 1 active TV in the living room and multiple PCs in the office, but the bedroom is for sleeping, reading and....oh....this here is a family site... I do have an alarm clock in the bedroom, but that's it for gadgets.
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“It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance.” ― Thomas Sowell



I've thought about that--no electronics in the bed room, or at least no TV. I share the house with others so it's a little trickier to keep everything in the living room, so it's not a great option now, but I'll have to think about it down the line, for sure.

iPad's not going anywhere, though.



A system of cells interlinked
Yeah, it's just LT and I, and we used to have a TV in the bedroom, but I would tend to stay up too late or waste half my Saturday dicking around in bed watching TV all morning. my aim was to cut way down on TV intake, which i have done, only watching a few shows on DVD or Netflix now.

"There are two types of people in this world, people who walk into a room and turn off a TV, and people who walk into a room and turn it on." - Manchurian Candidate

I am the former - LT is the latter.



Keep on Rockin in the Free World
We have a Toshiba 30 inch flat screen monster in teh rec room that i snagged 2nd hand for $100 including teh stand. Thing ways a ton, but the picture is terrific, and besides which i inadvertently through out the remote control, but our DVD player (also a Toshiba) works both, plus it lights up in a neato orange glow which i think should be standard.

32 inch Sharp Aquos in the bedroom, and my wife kicks herself daily for how much she spent 4 years ago on teh christmas gift for me. ($500 i believe my visa said )

A 42 inch Samsung rounds out the TV's in teh Riley household. Its fine, but boy oh boy, i should have spent the extra 80 bucks or whatever it was to have the delivery guys get the settings right. It was a pain in the arse doing it myself.

I know that we are probably being short changed to some degree, and my brothers love grinden my gears over this, but our Audio package is all-in-one in a box numbers from RCA that we bought at Costco a decade ago. My older brother has the dream kickass theatre room, and while im not gonna fib and say our setup is on par, or anywhere close, it works for us.
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"The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it." - Michelangelo.



A 48" LCD Magnavox and a 32" LCD Vizio. Both 1080p. I routinely use the 48" for movie watching.



Two Samsung's, one 40" the other 32". The 40" for the general movie/TV watching area, the 32" for the bedroom. Both 1080p. Very happy with both purchases.

Before that I had an old box, Panasonic 22" TV/DVD combo. Horrible little thing.



I've had a Phillips 52'' Plasma since 07'. cost me 1000 Quid with sound system.
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I have a 60" 3D Panasonic plasma. Got it for $1400 no tax from Amazon during a price drop. Model is P60ST30 I believe.... a 2010 model. I have another 60" LG plasma that I have in my other home, which I got for $925 @ Fry's on another fast special. It's great, but the Panny has much better blacks. Just working on building up the theater system. Currently just 2 Polk large standing floor speakers which I got for $300 from newegg on an xmas dealy. both TVs are great for night movie watching. I still visit regular theaters tho



I had a 48 inch LCD LG, cost me £1500 when LCD were pretty much brand new... but it packed up a month after the guarantee ran out (typical modern technology), so I had to resort to what I could afford.
Was a proper decent telly too. Had tons of features and functions and the picture was absolutely crystal clear.

Now using a 26 inch LCD Samsung. Works well, good picture, but miss my big telly.

Prefer LCD to Plasma everytime, I've always found Plasma have less of a clear picture and don't last as long.




TV technology? It's a moving picture

It took 40 years from John Logie Baird’s first black-and-white TV to get colour TV transmissions in the UK, and more than 30 years before the UK launched its first digital TV system.

Just over a decade later, high definition TV is commonplace, all of our TV broadcasts are in digital formats, and we’re reconsidering what TV is, and if we still want a big screen as the centre of everyday life.

Reliable rockets have made it easy to launch broadcasting satellites the size of a bus into space, more than 20,000 miles above our heads. They can cover the whole of the UK, and deliver hundreds of TV channels compared to the dozens that come through your aerial on Freeview.

More than half of British homes now have a broadband internet connection, and for many of us that’s as likely to deliver video entertainment as an aerial or satellite dish, whether it’s YouTube or more professional services like Netflix, Lovefilm and the all-conquering BBC iPlayer.

It’s all instant, of course, and that’s the biggest change ahead for TV. If you have a young child, they already find it hard to understand that CBeebies isn’t available instantly on your iPad, laptop or smart TV.

There are limits to instant satisfaction: even if it can delivered instantly, on-demand, the poor, lumbering blobs of flesh we call people can’t make films and TV shows much faster than they already do. Even so, how long will it be before the BBC releases the latest episode of EastEnders at 2am instead of 7.30pm, ready for anyone to watch from the moment they wake up?

We’re already forgetting what it means to ‘miss’ a TV show. Digital TV recorders like TiVo and YouView have ‘backwards’ programme guides that let you browse what was on yesterday, and watch via broadband. The seven-day limits of catch-up services like iPlayer are merely the creations of killjoy lawyers and accountants.

By 2020, they will have evaporated, and as you rewind through past TV shows on catch-up TV, there will come a point where you’re asked for a small payment to watch the older episodes.

If you’ve got a digital TV recorder like Sky+, it’s already hard to miss your favourite shows, and the recordings are yours to keep. TiVo is clever enough to record shows it thinks you might like, and this intelligence is going to grow into a digital butler, who will present us with a menu of entertainment when the TV switches on, tailored to our tastes.

This won’t just be happening on one big screen, but on mobile phones, tablets and via games consoles which are already morphing into entertainment hubs for children. It will happen on any screen we can see, even on blank walls, via the micro-projector built into your smartphone.

How will it look? More detailed, for a start. It shouldn’t be a surprise that today’s Full HD has been shown its shelf-life, and it’s about 10 years. The 2012 Olympic Games are also being used as a showcase for the next step in TV quality: ultra high definition TV, or Super Hi-Vision.

SHV is the name given by its developers at Japanese state broadcaster NHK, who also developed high definition TV, 25 years before it was debuted on British screens. It’s 16 times more detailed than Full HD, and four times more detailed than the Digital Cinema technology used in Hollywood, so it could conquer the film industry as well.

You’ll need a bigger screen to enjoy Super Hi-Vision, and Full HD starts to look less impressive on screens larger than 85in anyway. That’s the size of the SHV display Sharp showcased at last year’s IFA tech show in Berlin, while Panasonic has brought a prototype 150in SHV screen to the International Media Centre at the Olympic Park.

There are still big hurdles in cameras, displays and broadcasting technology before it makes the leap from demonstration to reality, but NHK is confident those can be overcome in time for it to launch a Super Hi-Vision channel in Japan before the end of this decade.

SHV may be the last word in two-dimensional TV, since it was designed to match the resolution of average human eyesight. If they added more detail, we wouldn’t be able to see it.

It’s probably a stepping stone for 3D TV, which it’s fair to say hasn’t won the public’s love in the same way as HD and on-demand TV. The biggest obstacle is 3D glasses, but glasses-free 3D currently suffers from the ‘sweet-spot’ problem, where each viewer has to stay in one place to get the 3D effect.

It’s not very comfortable, and one way to overcome it is with very high resolution displays that can create a range of sweet spots so smooth you don’t even notice them. So your Super Hi-Vision TV may also be very nice for 3D.

But it probably won’t look like a TV, any more than a Sony Bravia today looks like a Sony Trinitron of the 1980s. Most likely, it’s be a thin, light and very bright organic LED screen, hanging on your wall.

If the next decade of TV is all too dizzying, don’t worry - you don’t have to be first. At this rate of progress, the classic ‘early adopter’, who wants all the latest tech as soon as possible, starts to look like a bit manic. If you want to wait, the latest new ‘thing’ will have the kinks ironed out in a year or two, it’ll be cheaper and better.
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/how-tv-tech...g-picture.html
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