I consider myself a fairly patient person. In June, I sold my 34-inch Sony KV-XBR910 CRT HDTV. I was moving to a new apartment that month and the thought of moving this 250-pound behemoth--that I'd already moved twice before in the last three years--was just too daunting.

I paid more than $2,000 for the TV in 2003 and in June 2008, I put it up on eBay and Craigslist for $500. I got $150. Unfortunately, because I had an extremely small window of time before having to vacate my old apartment--and because I was afraid of being stuck with this huge piece of hardware I could not move on my own--I ended up selling it for a price much lower than what I had originally desired.

It's hard for me to even write that, honestly, as I'm sure there were things I could have done differently to get a much better return on my investment. But what's done is now done. I truly wish the soulless excuse for a human being who bought it from me the best of luck with it and I mean that in the best way.

I guess I can't blame all the eBayers and Craigslisters who passed up my TV at $500. I mean why buy a 5-year old, 250-pound TV which, although in great condition, does not have as many connection options or as big of a screen as a 50-pound, 40-inch LCD they can get for $1,000 or so.

Yes, I see how this could have been a hard sell. However, it really depressed me to realize that I was having trouble selling a 5-year-old TV for just a quarter of its original price. Is this even normal depreciation? Actually, I don't really want to know, now that what's done is done. Perhaps I should just move on and look toward bigger and better things.

Unfortunately, I've yet to actually do that. Since selling it, I've been forced to slum it with my girlfriend's 15-year old, 13-inch Philips/Magnavox TV/VCR combo while I determine which LCD HDTV I want to invest in. A few weeks back I watched the season finale of Battle Star Galactica. I won't spoil it here, but the final shot of that episode has a reveal that let's just say I had trouble fully appreciating while watching it on this thing. I remember having to get off the couch and get within a foot of the TV to see anything and even then I was like, "Um, WTF am I even looking at?"

Thanks to high-definition pics I've found on forums, I've since learned what I was missing. Friday I watched the opening ceremony to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing and like most people I was greatly impressed by the incredible show China put on.

On Saturday, I went over to my friend Dan's house to hang out and to finally meet his 9-month-old daughter. The visit contained both the highlight and the low point of my weekend. While his daughter was one of the coolest babies I've ever met, watching the Olympics in HD on his HDTV was so visually impressive that it depressed me that I'd just watched the opening on such a clunker. This was an opening of such ambition that nothing like it will probably ever be attempted again in my lifetime and I got to waste its full impact on the gadget you see above.

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Plasma Television Reviews | No Comments »

Before the Vizio VP322 came along, we always said that plasma-screen HDTVs basically started at 42 inches and went up from there. One exception was Panasonic's 37-inch size, which is still available in the form of models like the TH37PH10UK professional model, but now that Panasonic is into LCD at that size, it no longer markets a 37-inch plasma to consumers.

Vizio, one of the few budget companies that bothers with both plasma and LCD, has taken another tack in introducing the smallest plasma yet. The 32-inch VP322 is the same size as the company's popular VO32L, an LCD model, and it has the same list price. But a few items on the spec sheet are different, including native resolution, contrast ratio, or course, response time. So do those specs translate to visible differences between the Vizio and other budget LCDs?

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Vendors want to sell you stuff! There, it's finally been said. Don't believe me? Well, you wouldn't be the first, but thankfully, I have evidence.

Within the last year I've seen a new spec, called dynamic contrast ratio (DCR), tossed around for computer displays. If you didn't know before, contrast ratio is simply the difference between the darkest blacks and the brightest whites a given display can produce.

Typically, computer displays have a contrast ratio of about 1000:1. However with DCR, you'll see numbers like 4000:1, 10,000:1, and higher. Basically, it's just a way for Company A to proclaim, "Don't buy Company B's monitor because it has a much lower DCR than our monitor." Since more and more vendors have been pushing this, I want to delve further into how they're getting these numbers. I also covered this topic in less detail (but with a sexy voice thrown in) in episode 2 of the Inside CNET Labs podcast.

Before a monitor is released to the public it goes through a bunch of testing in the vendor's own lab. These tests produce the specs that the vendor will then publish with the release. Specs like maximum brightness, pixel pitch, pixel response time, contrast ratio, and dynamic contrast ratio are all determined in the vendor's own lab.

When testing normal contrast ratio, vendors use a device that measures light to determine how much light is emanating from a display while it's showing both a completely black and a completely white screen. They then take each number, do a bit of math, and come up with the contrast ratio.

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Prices continue to fall among pretty much all types of HDTVs, but competition in the budget LCD market is particularly fierce, with companies like Samsung, Toshiba, and Vizio continually cutting prices. Sharp's new SB series of LCD HDTVs--the 42-inch LC-42SB45U, 46-inch LC-46SB54U and 52-inch LC-52SB55U--are aimed at the budget ...

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In case you didn't know, the upcoming DTV transition from analog to digital television shouldn't affect cable subscribers at all. But that's not stopping cable companies from using the increasingly well-publicized and misunderstood transition to encourage potential customers to cough up more money.

Take this report by HD Guru Gary Merson, who called an NYC-area cable provider Cablevision posing as a regular customer and was told that "due to government regulation," the company would no longer carry analog channels. As Gary points out, this is patently false--nothing in the government's mandated transition prevents cable companies from continuing service as-is. They may, however, decide to force analog-only subscribers to get a digital subscription and the requisite box, which of course adds a monthly box rental fee and opens up the possibility of customers ordering lucrative Pay-Per-View and Video-On-Demand services.

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