Welcome to an HD world

Yesterday was my sixth wedding anniversary. How did I spend it, you ask? Looking at HD TVs. And it was my wife’s idea.

Yeah, she’s pretty flipping sweet.

Our original plan was to head up to Amicolola Falls, Bert’s Pumpkin farm and the BBQ place whose name I cannot remember. At 10:30 it was still 46 degrees, and with Alison still on the tail end of a cold, we eschewed the possible issues with walking uphill in chilly weather. What was our backup plan? Technically we had no backup plan. We get the Sunday paper, and as I started looking through the fliers she kindly told me that she had already done the research. It’s one thing to look at pictures. It’s another to go for the field test.

We started at Best Buy. Best Buy has a good selection and it happens to be across the street. We were accosted by a very persistent Direct TV salesperson. He made a great pitch and kept lowering the rate on our perceived deal. We weren’t biting. We’re probably the worst recipients of the hard sell, as we listen at first but then fade away as the presentation goes into its second quarter-hour. It was the first realization that buying an HDTV is a lot more complex than it looks.

Yeah, you can get the TV with the purty picture, but when you have a standard cable setup and TiVo, there are multiple upgrades to consider. If we get a new TV, we need an upgrade, whether it be from Comcast, Direct TV or some other provider. Our TiVo box would be obsolete, and we love us some TiVo. Our DVD player as well would be out of date. And we were just starting on the items that we might need. We looked through the selections and I paid pretty good attention considering that Sunday football had not yet started. We liked a Samsung 46’’. I didn’t realize there was something called an LED, which is better than a LCD (further down in the alphabet), and oodles better than a plasma.

We left and went to BrandSmart. BrandSmart is a warehouse of everything electrical. The aisles are about 12 inches wide and there are hundreds if not thousands of people shopping. We found the TVs and soon made friends with a salesman. I couldn’t understand what he was saying. After 30 minutes, I started to catch on. The TV is great, and the upgraded cable, DVD, and DVR are givens. What about sound? We saw surround sound options that were nice in that they were only three speakers and you wouldn’t have to install them around the room with cords everywhere, just waiting for a kitty claw to ruin the whole setup. What we liked of the options available was the sound bar. It installs below the TV and enhances the sound. You can’t have HDTV picture with sucky sound, now can you?

Our salesman took us to a computer terminal that would have been state of the art in 1985 and started inputting everything that we’d need. The total cost would almost double the cost for just buying the TV. To connect all of our boxes we’d need HDMI cables. Yes, it’s 2009 and we’re still using cables. They’re just cooler now and cost about $90 a piece. Oh yeah, then there’s power. I get having the surge protector. Don’t they cost maybe$20? Oh, just you wait. We saw “power centers” which are surge protectors on steroids. You can pay up to $200 just in case there’s a power surge like the one in the first scene of the Terminator movie.

We thanked him and moved on. He might have been disappointed had there not been another dozen people just like us with dollar signs in our eyes.

I was fried, and even a protein-rich lunch at Pig and Chik did not help me long term. We went home. Alison spent about six hours on the computer and found all the items our salesperson listed for about $800 cheaper.

Did I mention the awesomeness?