shopping for terebi
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Mari wants to get a television. I hate the things passionately, and frankly Japanese television is if anything even more purile, melodramatic and ridiculous than the crap we get back in N. America.
But I digress. We set a budget of $1000 and started looking about. This being Japan, one is greeted at every electronics store with a gigantic choice of locally made goods. Obscenely, it now seems not uncommon for people to want TV's that are 50", 70" even 100" in diagonal size. The latter being the size of some of the movie cinema screens in the cramped multiplexes that they built in the 80's. In fact the larger sizes seem to be the default and it takes a bit of doing to find something more reasonable.
Between the two of us, we'd settled on a 32" size as a happy medium between Mari wanting something large and my threats to divorce her. As usual, I did a bit of digging around, and now have been to two stores and countless websites. While I still don't follow all of the technical details, I think I've found a model that has decent image quality at that size. Naturally, it's 50% above our arbitrary budget.
Which brings me to the costs. In my research I've read that with the current climate of economic panic, large TV's are suddenly not selling in the US. It seems it might be the same here in Japan because in the Bic Camera today all of the "small" (e.g. very large) TV's are 10% off and the really fucking huge ones are 15% off.
runaway!
After being dissuaded from buying a TV in a retail location, I wandered downstairs to the camera section (my natural habitat ... hey, I had to pick up some film). I've recently had a look at the Panasonic G1, and think that Panasonic is really onto something. It looks like it's not quite 100% there yet but a damn interesting development in the camera field. Tonight I checked out the LX3, also from Panasonic, and was equally impressed. As with every compact the thing had an unacceptable amount of shutter lag, but in every other respect (save perhaps the lack of a viewfinder) it was a well designed and well built machine. At $600 perhaps not as unreasonably priced as the G1.
For the same price, one can also pick up a Fuji Klasse. This is a point and shoot film camera and one of those models that just keeps drawing me back. The last thing I need is another camera, but there's something about that beautiful little camera that keeps bringing me back for another look. The controls are ... perfect. The feel of the thing in your hand is amazing. The autofocus is extremely fast (much more so than on my *istDS, which has such a wonky autofocus that I just don't use it) and from what I've seen online the image quality is excellent. Naturally I follow the N. American habit of preferring the 38mm Klasse S model (e.g. similar to my favourite SLR and DSLR lenses, similar to my rangefinder lens, and similar to my mum's Minoltina) over the Japanese normal Klasse W 28mm.
From there I decided to leave before I did anything stupid. And I came across the Pentax K-M, which is the latest in the line of DSLR's similar to my aforementioned *istDS. I have to say, I think Pentax has really knocked one out of the park. It's a beginner's camera with not only a help button for new SLR photographers but useful features like a highlight when viewing your photo on the LCD that shows which portions are overblown. It looks like a winner. I hope they sell １億台 of them.