After over 11 years of faithful service as our primary family room TV, my 42″ Panasonic plasma died last week. Time to do some TV shopping!
It’s hard to believe we’ve been using an ED (that’s right, 480P) television as our workhorse display for the past 11 years. When we bought it, we couldn’t quite afford the hefty price tag of the new HDTVs. My priorities at the time were lots of jacks (composite, component, HDMI, etc.) and the CableCARD slot for future digital cable. Over the years I’ve had all sorts of equipment connected to the TV (VCR, DVD changer, DVD burner, Wii, multiple TiVos, etc.) but never actually used the CableCARD slot (thanks to my first HD TiVo in 2006).
While connections are still important, my setup is now significantly simpler: the only thing I have connected to the TV is the TiVo Roamio Pro (via a single HDMI cable) and an optical audio cable to the receiver (which is 16 years old and still kicking!). So my priorities this time around were picture quality, size (the TV needs to fit in some built-in shelving), and miscellaneous extras like network connectivity, Bluetooth, etc.
After doing all of my normal Consumer Reports research, reading internet reviews, and doing price comparisons, I selected the 50″ Samsung UN50JS7000 (the 55″ model was unfortunately just a smidge too tall to fit in my cabinet) and picked it up a at local Best Buy (who also took care of recycling my old plasma for $25).
