So I was thinking about this the other day and decided that it was entertaining enough to me that I wanted to write it up. Your mileage may vary, but this is the story of the televisions that I've owned.
When I headed off for college, my parents bought me a non-descript black and white portable TV for me to have in my dorm room. This was a good thing, because there were shows that I wanted to watch and they weren't always on the dorm's TV. I forget where they got it (although the Base Exchange was likely) and I don't remember what brand it was (although vagrant memory says it was a GE) and it was as satisfactory as a small black and white TV was going to be.
When I was in grad school, my roommates in the house I was living in the last year that I was there came back from a garage sale and announced that there was a small color TV for sale there for $150. I hurried out the door and came back with a smaller, but *color* Sony TV which moved to Chicago with me. And I had that TV for a number of years, until I eventually got a larger model which I *think* was a 27-inch Panasonic that I got at Best Buy or Circuit City. By then, I was in my first house, so a larger TV was in order.
When my mom got sick, there was some chance that she was going to end up in Chicago for treatment, so I bought a larger TV so that my parents would have something better to watch. This was a 32-inch JVC set that I got at Douglas TV. The Panasonic moved upstairs to the bedroom.
Now, this JVC set was huge and heavy as sin and sat on a not-so-attractive black stand that had come with it. At some later point in time, one of the oak furniture stores that we dealt with was going out of business. I dropped in to see what they had and recalled how Gretchen had said that the current TV stand was ugly (which was true), although Gretchen recalls saying that the entertainment centers were nice, which is not so much the same thing. But they had a *big* oak TV stand on casters that I liked a lot, so I bought it and got Gretchen to bring the van by to pick it up. She had thought that maybe I bought a new office chair, but no, I had bought a new TV stand.
We took the stand home and put it into the living room and put the ginormous JVC set on top of it. The old TV now looked petite. Gretchen immediately referred to the TV stand as "The Camel's Nose", because clearly my intent was to buy a big screen TV.
I explained that wasn't the case. Although I was interested in getting a big screen TV, there was still so much 4:3 content that we would be watching that it didn't make *sense* to get a big screen TV, because burn-in was a serious problem at the time on the existing big widescreen sets and we'd just end up with bars on each side of the screen and that would suck. So there was no danger of buying a big screen TV.
And it got close to Christmas and there was an ad in the paper about a new widescreen TV over at Fretter. I went to look at it. It was a DLP set. In discussions with the salesman, I learned that the DLP sets did not have the burn-in problem that the current generation of plasma and LCD sets had.
After some serious discussions with Gretchen, I bought the DLP set, thereafter known as "The Camel". And the great TV rotation started, with the Panasonic going to the living room, the JVC to the bedroom, and The Camel to the family room. Later, the DLP sets had gotten much cheaper and I bought a second, slightly larger DLP set from Fry's, giving the Panasonic away, sending the older DLP set to the bedroom, and the JVC to the living room.
Not too many years later, Amazon had a 42 inch plasma screen for a low price, so the JVC was given away to a friend, and the plasma screen went to the living room.
At the moment that plasma screens were on their way out the door, I bought a 58 inch plasma screen for the family room from Abt. The DLP set from the family room displaced the DLP set in the bedroom, which I think I eventually gave to a friend.
Then the DLP set in the bedroom started getting flaky. I actually managed to replace the DLP chip in the beast and got some more mileage out of it, but it was clearly not going to last a lot longer. It did, however, last just long enough for me to pick up a 50 inch OLED screen from H.H. Gregg. I like it a lot.
It is noteworthy, I think, that every single one of these televisions was bought from a different source. Many of those sources are now out of business. This says something, although I'm not exactly sure what.
But that is the story of nearly 50 years of my televisions.
If I still had that black and white portable *and* I was able to get a signal to it that it could decode, my children would look at it and laugh at me. Of course, they each have small Vizio flat-screens in their room (acquired from Sam's Club) that cost about the same as that used Sony portable from my college days.
My dad, who for a while had two televisions stacked on top of each other in his family room for use during football season, would look at my current collection of TVs and would be suitably jealous.
If he were still around, I guess I'd have to buy him one. :)
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