I’ve been having one of those Bad Pete Good Pete battles.
Good Pete says – you don’t need a new telly, the one you have now is perfectly adequate.
Bad Pete says – but the new one would be HUGE, 3d, it’s on sale and … it’s SHINY.
Shiny things are always good.
What am I looking at ?
I could get a 55″ Samsung 3d capable LED backlit telly today only for £650. That would be an immense upgrade to the 32″ LCD telly I have now. And in theory, I could use the LCD telly as a new PC monitor. I won’t because this monitor is just big enough to fit where I put it, the corners fit my field of view well and it’s a decent quality LED lit monitor. It’s got better display quality than my ageing telly.
It’s not ageing, although I did have to replace the batteries in the controller not so long ago.
The telly is actually the only bit of my system that doesn’t support 3d, the bluray player and amplifier both do. But … those spec thingys are confusing aren’t they ? What’s available and what do I think of it ?
Curved – this is the new Big Thing. I see it as a marketing fad, soon to fade away into obscurity. It depends on the viewer being in a certain position and … I most often watch telly from where I have my desktop PC chair. That’s about 20 degrees off the midline where I’d be for the optimal position on the sofa. So curved is a waste of time for me.
3d – I um and arr over this. I can see the 3d benefit but … I’d only have advantage of the 3d on a very few blurays that I’ve bought. And then there’s the wearing of the 3d glasses over my normal glasses. So why think 3d ? To enable the effect, means high refresh rates on the screen. This is good for 2d as well, because it vastly reduces flicker and motion blur.
4k – this has more pixels per inch. 1080p is good for my current telly at 32″, because the dots are small. At 55″, the dots are that much bigger, so having more dots gives you that sharpness that would otherwise go away. This works best if the telly has enough intelligence to turn 1080p into 4k. Otherwise, I don’t have any sources that could send the higher resolution to the screen.
So all those fancy things are all a bit of a waste of time for me. However … there is such a thing as future proofing … And that says I should be looking at the tellys which have more dots in. (A 4k).
I’m going to let Good Pete win this time for a good reason – I’d want the telly delivered. I think it would fit in the car with the back seats down but I’d want them to come and take away my older CRT telly and the various telly packaging I have. Which means being in.
Telly buying can wait until the January sales come along.
Many other people aren’t thinking about that, they’re rushing to the sales anyway …
They crazy !
The world seems to be genuinely going mad at the moment. Mob rule is raising its ugly head more and more. Crowds of rabid shoppers are assaulting the stores, the storepeople and each other in the rush to get bargains. And it’s not just that, we’re seeing raising civil unrest in places like Ferguson where it seems like the mob didn’t get its way, so the mob protests. Led by a rabble rousing lawyer.
I don’t have the full facts there but it’s a sign that things are starting to get out of control.
It could be time to get that house in the hills and turn it into a fortress.
As long as it has internet, a generator and plenty of places to keep the snacks.
Plans for the weekend ? I’ve been feeling run down, so it’s time for chilling out, watching stuff, maybe reading stuff, quite possibly buying stuff in the Steam sale and generally trying to recharge those batteries. But if someone has a better offer, I’m all ears 🙂
Oh and there will be the occasional raiding of the hot chocolate supply.