I like to dream big. At the moment, I’m dreaming of a big TV. When I wander into a big box electronics store, I can’t help but be drawn to the giant HDTV televisions. Like Homer Simpson, I begin to drool over the thought … mmm … giant plasma … glllll … lushious LCD … and then I think of old faithful at home …

No, not the dog. Our eleven-year-old twenty-seven inch Toshiba TV–the digital hearth of the living room.

In the early days, the Toshiba seemed positively huge. Placed as it was, close to the couch, it was all the TV we needed. But we rearranged the living room a few years back and moved the screen to the far side of the room. All of a sudden, that big TV got really small.

I dream of the day when we can repurpose old faithful as the bedroom TV and jettison the rickety cabinet. And I salivate at the thought of putting a huge flat screen HDTV unit in its place.

But I’m torn over technology. Of late, I’ve been reading all I can find about plasmas, LCDs, DLPs and other rear projection units. I’ve given up on a LCD projector. I’ve resigned myself to the fact that with two skylights and a sliding glass door, there’s just too much light in the room–and there’s no easy location to place the projector.

Kids today take all of this color television technology for granted. (I know my kids do.) But I grew up in a house that had one of the first color TVs on the block. Even more than that, my dad was employed as an egghead at RCA’s Sarnoff lab developing the technology.

With everything solid state, today’s kids have never seen a tube-based television. But I remember the RCA repairman coming out just about every month to replace one tube or another.

So when my kid asks “why can’t we get a 60 inch plasma screen TODAY, dad?” I have to answer him with the line, “because you’re not me, I’m not my dad, and I can’t just go to the company store and have them take it out of my paycheck each week.”

Want to help me out with my decision? If you’ve put in a big screen TV, I want to hear from you–good or bad–for an upcoming article, of course (not to mention the betterment of our home entertainment environment) …