After yesterday’s heavy post, I’m going to write an easy one today. My wife hates when a television’s quality is so good, movies look… well, like they’re on a lighted set, even when the action is outdoors. To her,...
After yesterday’s heavy post, I’m going to write an easy one today.
My wife hates when a television’s quality is so good, movies look… well, like they’re on a lighted set, even when the action is outdoors. To her, our 20-year-old 720p TV was perfect. It looked nice enough when we played DVDs, Blu-ray discs looked no better than the aforementioned DVDs and watching sports wasn’t great, but it wasn’t all that bad, either.
It took hours to set up the Blu-ray player to work with that dinosaur of a TV, but I did get the two to work. Then my in-laws moved in.
My wife and I don’t watch much TV, mainly movies. My in-laws are the opposite. So, in switching back from the DVD HDMI selection to the TV, they must have hit a few buttons they shouldn’t have because all of a sudden DVDs wouldn’t play anymore. They’d spin up and the sound worked, but there was no picture. Black screen. Blu-rays played fine, thankfully enough.
And no amount of coaxing would allow me to access the setup screen so I could make the proper changes back. I was severely bummed. I have an amazing DVD collection and to be limited to Blu-ray movies only had me near a funk deep enough to require mainlined coffee to keep me going. Hey, when you’re recovering, coffee is about all you’ve got left. Well, coffee and barbecue. Anyway…
When I started work, my wife said we should get a new television. I had one picked out two hours later. A sweet Samsung 55? mid-grade TV. It’d be perfect and I figured at just $350, my wife wouldn’t object… and the picture quality wouldn’t be too good at that price point.
We walked through Costco on a shopping trip with my wife’s mom. We walked through the door, the three of us, but I took the cart straight to the TVs in a bee-line. And my wife said, “Well, we’ve got your car, so how about we wait.” That’s French for “shall we discuss this again next month”.
But NO! We went out to Best Buy, the electronics giant, the next day, solely to look at TVs. We fell for the sales pitch, too. “Take a look at these four TVs and tell me which you like best. We, meaning my wife (because I’m a moviephile, and this is a no-brainer), picked Sony’s #1 and #2 in the line… at a paltry $1,399 and $899 respectively for the 55” version. My wife looked at me and whispered, “What part of $300 to $600 budget did he not understand”. There was no arguing with that. She was right as rain.
We looked at the TVs in our price range next. There were flaws with all of them, mainly reflection issues and neither of us was impressed. Then, we took a saunter over to the “open box” TVs. TVs that were purchased and opened, and can’t be sold as new… and we found one marked as a Sony X85 – one step lower than the $1,400 high-end TV we originally picked when we first started the process. However, when the TVs demo-mode started over, it flashed “X90”. They had it marked wrong. Needlessly to say, we snapped it up (much to the chagrin of our salesman who said he’d walked by that TV for six months because he thought it was an 85) and ended up with the TV we picked but in our budget. Granted, it was at the higher end of the budget, but it was in there cozy.
So now we’ve got the cat’s pajamas. 55? UHD 4k TV, Blu-ray/DVD plyer, and all that matched up with a Bose Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround (with five speakers and a sub, it’s the real deal) that’ll crank Top Gun Maverick to 11.
Oh my God, I’m a happy boy. Though my wife has expressed distress that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to peel me away from a movie.
I’ll have to watch that!
