New TV

We picked up a new TV last night. Our old TV is 8 years old, and has been having some picture issues lately. (It will die completely sometime soon, we think.)

I have been watching the price of a Tube TV on Best Buy's website for about 2 months now. (Waiting for a deal.) I went over to the store on Tuesday night, it turns out that the TV I was watching for didn't have a very dark black. (It was more a charcoal grey.) The TV we had was a dark black screen , as far as tube TVs went 8 years ago. We thought we were getting a pretty good picture out of it, the darker black made the images look better. All the other Tube TVs we looked at were in the $400-$550 range. (We didn't want to go smaller than our current 27 inches on the screen size.)

Best Buy had a Sharp Aquos 32 inch LCD HDTV on sale for $650 for that past couple of days. We ended up buying this one instead. (I thought I would buy a tube TV, we weren't ready to buy an HDTV at this point, we thought an SDTV was good enough. Especially for the price of an HDTV.) 32 inches from 27 inches isn't that big of a jump, but it's noticeable, at least.

The sound quality on this new TV is really deep and rich. I thought our old TV had ok sound, but this one is better. The picture quality is really nice. We didn't know what we were missing out on with our old TV. The screen is even darker than our old one. (I'd say jet black, but then I'll be talking in 4 years from now how much more dark the screen for some other TV is...) Last night I put in "Superman Returns" to watch the opening credits on the new TV. It looks great. I also watched Duck Dodgers. We don't have too many HD channels on our subscription, but the picture quality on many of the channels just looks better now. The TV also has a VGA input to plug a laptop into. (The model higher has a DVI input) At some point I will have to play Age of Empires on the big screen. In a very short period of time, I have become an HDTV convert.

I also have a number of movies I would like to rewatch (Like Superman Returns) now that we have this TV.