TV repairable?

With a projector-box TV, I'm not surprised. Even the curb fairies have learned that once those screw up, repairing them is a large fraction of the cost of a flat-panel almost as big. Definitely a dead end on the television evolutionary tree. I saw those sitting by the dumpster at the apartments more than once. My sister and BIL have one, maybe 5YO, and the picture is already getting noticeably degraded. If I wanted that big, I'd go with a ceiling projector and a screen, like at work.

It's interesting to note that cheap electronics can be reliable because of integrated circuits. If a cheaply made item were made from discrete components, the MTBF of the individual cheap components would be horrid.

TDD

I still have my "first day purchase" 5150, both monochrome and color monitors, and an expansion unit and 10MB hard disk. The single-sided drive is long gone (I think). It's also got 704K of memory in it.

It was a business decision (Intel vs. Motorola), not marketing.

You can't have high quality and high prices and billions sold (see: McDonalds). There *will* be a race to the bottom. Particularly in this case, I don't see that as a problem.

On my laptop? Very little, and no, no movie watching. I have a TV for that. Even YouTube is painful over my Internet connection.

I'm lucky if I can get half the 768K I'm supposed to.

Every widescreen TV should have a button to switch between 16:9 and 4:3 ratios.

Mine does, and includes a "panoramic" mode that shows EVERYTHING distorted.

That's the setup I have. The projector is smaller than a VCR, and can easily be moved around. The screen I have is 60 inches wide (58 inches usable because of black strips on the sides), but could easily be changed to a larger one (using the same projector).

BTW, it still seems wrong that "widescreen" on that setup means a SMALLER picture.

Even 1.5Mb/s sometimes isn't sufficient for YouTube. It's better if you pause the video long enough to allow the download to get well ahead of the playback (or even complete). Or you can simply save the FLV (or MP4) file, and play it back at leisure.

It must suck to be a member of the underprivileged class.

I signed up for Netflix streaming video a couple of weeks ago. I've finished two seasons of a pay-tv series "The Tudors," and am now watching "Pillars of the Earth" series from a novel by Ken Follett, plus a few interspersed movies.

At 25-30Mbs (it varies), I'm in a happy place.

It is crazy. I put out $15 for a new cell phone. It works just fine.

I think it was a joke.

That's what I do and it's painful.

AT&T customer, you bet. They're not as bad as Dish, though. The city is supposed to be running "fiber to the house" sometime in the next couple of years. Maybe that'll help.

The kid gets 18Mb. They got rid of their cable completely and watch "TV" over the Internet.

Hi, That's it. Hook a laptop onto big flat panel TV with 7.1 home theater set up. Audio, video is all HD. We seldom go to cinema any more.

I still like the theater for some movies, though a lot less often since we're no longer seniors. $9.50 a ticket is nuts for most of the garbage anymore.

I've seen prepaid cells for as little as $9.00. Golly! I seem to remember a hand held cellphone costing more than two grand. :-)

TDD

I hope that the "CRT" you're referring to is the whole TV set and not the picture tube. Opening it can be fatal -- for both you and the tube.

I can't recall seeing a TV with a back cover interlock in over 30 years! I find that somewhat bizarre considering all the safety features included in modern TVs. They must figure that if you're going to remove all the screws to get the back cover off, any interlock won't stop a qualified person (or fool) from powering the set. There are more warning labels than ever before, however.