Lockergnomaniac Jeff Partridge (not in a pear tree yet) told me that this was my lucky day! He was responding to my post the other day about searching for a new home. Listen to his sage words of advice:

Since I’ve just gone through the geekiest form of agony recently, let me throw a few tips your way. We, too, wanted to set up something a little more like this-millennium (rather than a CRT-based TV). We knew that we wanted to get an HDTV. We knew we had precisely one shot at it (unless we won the lottery). I used every resource that any self-respecting geek would: looking up reviews on the Internet and then taking that info to the nearest big-box store for price comparisons and as much hands-on time as I could steal before the next recently-teenaged salesman came by.

And then things happened.

I got caught in the technological virtual twister. It turned out that there wasn’t just one choice. There were several. We could have gotten one of two or three 42” plasma sets, or (if pushed) a 40” LCD, or a breathtaking 61” DLP rear projection marvel. Well, due to a certain lack of resolution in that size range, we axed the LCD. Our one chance couldn’t be wasted.

That left us the choice between the plasma sets and the DLP. Despite the obvious plus of the size difference, the choice was really tough. Both of the sets that were in the final round were capable of the same 1080p resolution (I said we were gonna have one shot at it) and had equivalent inputs/outputs. Both had more-or-less lovely picture quality. Both were, in fact, from the same manufacturer. But the final straw in the debate was that the 61” DLP set was the same price as the 42” plasma set, within a $100 or so.

No contest, d00d: the 61-incher won!

Now, if you do your homework as well as I did mine, you may unearth the fact that there’s a mom-and-pop outfit that grew big out your way and that they have really, really good prices for HDTV’s. The fact that said TV would have to be shipped approximately 2500 miles made me rather unwilling to consider their otherwise generous price.

The surprising thing about the online shopping was that it wasn’t Pricegrabber or Floogle or reselleratings.com that gave me the best price. Instead it was a link from the manufacturer’s own site. The manufacturer is Samsung. You can do some serious shopping using their site. Savings in the hundreds of dollars over any other source are possible, if you chase enough links and catch the sales right.

As for the room, we didn’t have a real option, so it sits in our 12 x 16 family room and we sit back the ‘recommended distance’.

Tags: hdtv, home entertainment, high def, high defninition, plasma, dlp