Three days before the analogue signal was scheduled to die I finally bit the bullet and decided to consign to history the long-lived but now tired old set. What do you mean I left it to the last minute? Heaven sent, for an old procrastinator, to have this opportunity almost overtake me and force the decision. And the price I paid was to reduce research time to almost nothing, barely a peek, scarcely time to open a browser and type in “TV Deals”.
Still, that’s how we do it these days. And not just when we are hunting down something to replace the Trinitron. No doubt we will add our next house to the shopping basket before much longer, but until then our hunter-gatherer impulses can be exercised via Firefox or one of its cousins to buy just about anything. It’s almost too easy, which makes it seem all the stranger when, bleary-eyed, and choice-spoiled, I realize that hours have evaporated and the CRT is still hogging its half of the living room.
Then, just in time to quell a growing fear that the few bits of information that I really need would never condense out of the clouds of data already inspected, the air cleared. It seems that for sports, at least fast-moving ones like football, an LCD job might not refresh fast enough. Maybe I needed to go for LED, but then a review pops up from someone insisting that only Plasma will do. At least I had some grasp of the most important single aspect of my intended purchase. It was time to visit the shed on the highway and take a critical look at actual pictures on actual sets.
When I arrived, another day closer to the terrifying deadline, the programs on the loop didn’t include anything faster moving than darts. Never before have I attempted to follow the flight of anything with such intense concentration. Hardly ever have I had such a strong feeling that the exercise was pointless. Another shop, another couple of hours of wriggle room spent, and I found what I needed. End-to-end stuff with the ball going at a million miles per hour.
Packing my wallet I was now on my deadline-busting mission. My last viewing had demonstrated that LED was sufficiently good to keep up with the ball, and that 3D was unnecessary – that the grass was green was fine, I didn’t need to see individual blades. Imagining the screens in the living room at home proved impossible but as it turned out, 40” was just the right size. The feather-like weight was a pleasant surprise, the price only fractionally more than a similar LCD. Mission accomplished. Time now for the Freeview box installation, a new ordeal begins.
Image Courtesy: FreeDigitalPhotos.net
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