buying a TV
the journal of Michael Werneburg
twenty-seven years and one million words
Buying a TV has become insanely difficult. Price and quality beyond a certain point seem to have become decoupled, and the crazy array of technologies now available just compounds things. A friend of mine who relocated to Japan from Toronto (and now lives one stop over from us on the Chuo line) simply walked into Bic Camera and bought at the advice of one of the fellows there - who told him "Just choose something that looks good to you". He doesn't know the brand of the TV he bought.
In my case, this is the third time I'm buying a flat-screen TV. In both cases I felt I got burned in the transaction. The first time, I bought a Samsung that had a history of great reviews. But it turned out that it didn't have any audio out ports as the reviews all claimed it did. "Best Buy" (surely the most inaccurately named company on Earth) made a return impossible, and I later discovered on an electronics forum that what I had was a "special" version of the well-regarded model that had been produced for Black Friday - they'd stripped some of the features out to cash in on the model's popularity and boost the profits. In exchange, they'd discarded me as a consumer for life. Then there was the Vizio model, an actual "smart TV" from a line produced by a company that had a reputation for innovation. The innovations we lived with included conking out in hot weather and not having a TV tuner. It wasn't an actual television! Somehow Vizio had decided to stop adding a tuner during the exact period that I bought the thing (a decision that was quickly reversed).
Anyway, knowing that we're barely going to use a TV with our current lifestyle and not being sure how long we'll live in Tokyo this time, I decided not to over-spend or over-think the purchase. We went with a Chinese brand that's been around about twenty years and has (so far) not put ads into their TV operating systems, unlike a number of Japanese and Korean manufacturers. Hello, "HiSense 50E6800".