I haven’t watched television in — as far as I can remember — twenty years. Something around that anyway.
I own a TV set — an old one, not the modern flat kind — and it’s started to develop problems. I use it to watch DVDs, and now there are a couple of areas of the screen where the colors are off.
(Sometimes I do watch TV shows on DVD, mostly Firefly, Nero Wolfe, and Ellery Queen.)
So, time to replace the set, right? But the problem is that TVs have got a lot more complex since the last time I bought one. There are all sorts of different connectors now (I don’t even know what HDMI is, and apparently it’s already passe). There are also various ways to get video from a tablet to a TV set, and I don’t understand any of them.
Plus, TVs mostly seem to be monstrously huge now. I really don’t want to have a TV that’s going to be the biggest thing in the room.
But mainly I don’t want to have to devote a lot of time and brain power to learning about a damn TV set. I think that, for now, I’ll tolerate the color problem (at least until it gets worse…). And for the movies I have on my tablet, I’ll survive without “throwing” the video to a larger screen.
I enjoy learning technical stuff, when the subject is something I’m actually interested in. TV, not so much.
My day job is in video-adjacent software, and video is monstrously confusing these days. It’s also measurably worse than in olden days in certain ways – the pictures are sharper, but changing channels is slower. It’s also much harder to pick up where you left off with a video disc than a tape. And don’t get me started about the futility of 4K for home applications.
But anyway.
My recommendation is to get a dumb TV and then plug a smarter box into it. For instance, we use a BluRay player to stream video. It’s a lot cheaper to upgrade the smart box later than it is to buy a new smart TV.
It is complicated, though. I theoretically know what I’m talking about and I try to avoid thinking about it too much. You have my sympathies.
Thanks for the view from the pro side. This reinforces my idea that I’m going to do nothing for at least a while longer.
When even professionals say something is “monstrously confusing”… 🙂
Tv’s are hard to understand for me too. There are plenty of times that I try to do something, find it’s not working, and then just wait for it until my husband gets home. Hope this yours keeps going for quite a while longer. 🙂
So do I, since I don’t have a husband to help me, and I haven’t a clue on my own.
🙂