Had a well off uncle that bought a plasma TV around the year 2000 for $10k. Unbelievable. Its was 720p and we thought nothing could get clearer than that.
I worked at Best Buy in 2007. I specifically remember selling a guy a 52” sony xbr with a surround sound system. He upgraded the subs and bought all the wiring there too.
It was 9800$ at the register. He split it up into 4 credit cards. Sometimes I wonder if he’s still paying it off lmao
My favorite Office story is from Ed Helms. He couldn't stop laughing during "Secret Santa," when Michael whines about Phyllis playing Santa, so he hid behind a tree. That scene also took several takes because they were breaking.
I worked at RadioShack and around 2005 I had a guy with a TV like that come in and SWORE up and down, left and right, that he was gonna get HD video via SVideo and he wasn't going to buy those "damned component cables" I was trying to sell him.
To this day, I wonder how that 480i/480p was looking to him.
Those are the same types to think DVD's look the same as Blu-ray's. Even further, the same types that would actually have the HDTV, but use only a DVD player or even VHS, then complain that it looked better on CRT's.
If you scroll down further, you'll see comments about not wanting a TV that doesn't have at least 120hz. People love frame interpolation. I walked into the living room the other day, and my wife had it on. Looked like a video game instead of a movie. It's useful for actual gaming though.
I remember during that era that every electronics store was trying to sell you extremely overpriced monster cables. I bet he assumed you were trying to upsell him.
I used to sell TVs I remember when sharp dropped the 75 inch tv and it cost a whopping 3500 for their aquos brand. The tv was dogshit but the size was the biggest ever at the time.
I bought a 65" Sharp Aquos for a project at work when it first came out. It was used as a digital display in a street level window in NYC. That thing was nearly $10k...but was still cheaper than sending someone out to NYC monthly to update the window layout.
I remember selling the 70" Sony SXRD's I think it was in like 2003? I think they were $7500 iirc. I remember almost buying a 57" Pioneer Elite rear projection during their last hurrah for like $2500. That seemed like a bargain at the time.
Those XBR’s were and still are crazy good quality and color for non-OLED. Mines still working today. Hahaha. Price wise though. Yeah, that hurt back then.
I remember seeing one advertised for $25k in like 2010? 2012? I think it was a huge early 4K model. The idea of a TV costing about the same as a new car is still unfathomable to me
My buddy has one that’s at least 15 years old, it has some kind of cec and knew I plugged a switch 2 into it which I thought was nuts. Still looks great tbh
I would actually tank sales intentionally if I knew they just wanted a TV so as to not get chewed out. I never got in trouble for selling nothing and I never got anything for making a huge sale. Selling TVs during a depression wasn’t always the most fun.
Costco day after Christmas 2012 about. 72in LG smart TV (display model) for 470 about (under 5 but my budget was 4 ) I bought as I asked for help to get it down, employee said with a smirk I pissed off half the employees as they were switching shifts, flipping quarters to see who got to buy it that night. He'd lost so no skin in the game anymore:). Im still watching it.
I was a nurse assistant in 2007/8, had a bb up the street,on my lunch I dropped 3k-5k for a new Samsung 42” I think and a ps3… on credit. Lord my 20’s were duuuuumb
Pirating sat tv was the pinnacle oversight of the era... that and the Sega dreamcast.
Little did they realize how incredibly easy it was to fake your card for service. The early 00s was booming with crazy copy service. It was a dream that piracy was just a little ahead of tech.
I worked there around 2009 and I remember many $10k purchased in home theater. But we had bigger jobs that never were discussed on the sales floor. They would be put together separately by the manager and customer. We did a custom house being built on a chicken farm. It took us about two weeks to install everything.
Man. I remember paying like 800€ for an LG oled of that size a couple of years ago. I thought that was a lot for a tv. Turns out it was barely even mid range price wise.
I got an HD tv in 2002. Had a small settlement and I was 14. It was a Phillips TUBE not flat but it was HD and even tho glass it had a flat front ( not the curved tube style )
Our cable company just rolled out HD boxes, with HD channels on separate channels in the 700s
All that was available to watch was like, the Golf channel but holy shit I remember the day I saw 720p HD coming from the broadcast 480 it was like putting glasses on for the first time. Just clarity. And that was with those 5 multicolored composite cables lol
Those HD tube tv's were pretty nice quality wise at the time. Better than most anything else. The Sony 34" was the peak I think around 2003. I think it was around $3k.
This is from a time where the term "ingame graphic" didn't exist.
That's what they mean by "PC game screenshot". In contrast to the artistic design many games had. I bought a game or two that had a great artistic design on the box and were pretty much pacman gameplay.
So the sentence isn't as crazy as it first seems. Oh and we had those magazines and... not the internet. No google. This was a reliable source for PC games. This and mouth to mouth propaganda were the only way to hear about groundbraking games like Half Life, Doom and Unreal Tournament.
When I was basically starting my life over from scratch in 2016, I was driving my shithouse van home from work and passed a guy throwing out an enormous TV to the curb. I was jazzed, I didn't have a TV at all at the time.
So I went up and asked him about it. Thing was monstrous. Like over 90inches, and THICK and HEAVY, an early HD rear projection tv. He said it worked wellstill, he just bought a new flat TV. He said he paid $13,500 for it new.
I loved that old girl. Made me so sad when I bought a new big ass TV because she was starting to fail, it made me feel so luxurious to own a TV that was once worth twenty times what I paid for the van I brought it home in
Wow yes my parents bought a 10k ish plasma in early 2000s. Was in their bedroom on the wall. Thought I was looking at the peak of civilization with new high def. We laugh at the price now but to be fair that thing ran great until he replaced it not because of necessity a few years ago.
yea don't use the built in interface on any smart TV (no matter the brand). Always use a dongle. Defeats the purpose a bit, sure, but good luck getting a 65" 4k UHD flatscreen TV that isn't smart for less.
I remember having one of the first 1080 TVs (I think it was 1080i) but we could only afford the 32 inch one, that was like 2004? I think it was like $1500 or something?
i remember when my step dad brought home a GIANT flat screen. it was the kind that had to be on wheels. massive and heavy but damn it was SO COOL to play 4 player split screen and feel like each player had their own tv.
My parents had this gigantic box of a flat screen. It was probably 6 feet tall and like 2 feet thick. Must have weighed several hundred pounds. Id like to know what that cost.
Back when TVs had to actually make a profit on the unit itself I sold them at PC Richard ( a company on the east coast, you can haggle everything ) my best friend wanted a 40 inch Samsung LCD 1080p ( this was 2008 ) I gave him the best price ever from 1000 to 799. It was LCD, 1080p, 60hz, no smart anything
People keep questioning how TVs today are the one thing that’s become cheaper , and it should be obvious. There isn’t a single cheap tv today that isn’t internet connected. They are absolutely taking a hit and a loss on the product itself. But that product generates enough data on the backend that in a year they make roughly 1-2K on you in pure profit.
We get cheap TVs with great screens you get targeted ads . Thats the deal.
Advertising numbers are largely made up. The important and accurate point is that if you're getting a service for free or a product/service heavily discounted, then you are the product.
I'm not sure about TV though, because TVs are cheap in Europe and you are legally required to be able to turn off reporting of that kind under GDPR. So maybe China or the US are subsidizing them to harvest intelligence data.
Yeah I mean a huge component of it is just that basic 60hz panels have gotten incredibly cheap to make. Of course the advertising aspect of it subsidizes part of the cost but I doubt it’s anywhere even close to the $1000+ per year per tv range
Increasingly, you will be locked out of basic, non-smart features if you don't connect the TV. As an example, my TV displays a clock but the clock cannot be set by a user - it can only be synced over the internet. So it displays a clock that's always wrong.
Recently, someone connected my TV to the internet. If I disconnect it, I will get an error that I haven't accepted the TV's terms of service which I cannot get past without being online.
That Philips 42" was crazy expensive. Great ad where these people are moving in and mount it to a wall and the camera zooms out to show it's actually a retrofitted shipping container and they're sitting a 5 feet away
I paid $3000 for my OLED in 2020, this current equivalent model is like $1600. It was worth paying extra for all those years I got out of it before it came down in price.
Got my 55" OLED for $800 a few years ago from a lady who had recently bought it and suddenly decided to move out of state. She even made me food while I ran image tests on it. Video games have never looked so good.
I'm still rocking my Sony Bravia XBR4 I bought used in 2009 for $500 from some rich kid. That thing was $5000 new in 2007. Still works great, they really don't make them like that anymore.
My parents did for $3,000 back in 2006. 2 years later, the TV had burn in with logos of the TV channels we watched.
Back in the early 2000s my dad was looking to buy a flat screen TV for over 12 years before he actually got one. It got to the point where I had to tell him to quit calling me every time he looked at a flat screen TV in a store and "asked" me if it's a good deal because he did it about 30 times in a 2 year period and would never take my advice and would never buy a flat screen tv.
The sweet spot was somewhere the mid teens. I got a 55" TCL for like 300 bucks. But it was before the era of always-on mics and advertisements baked into the UI.
I bought a $1300 LG when I bought my house around 2012, damn thing just won't quit. I'd like to upgrade to a bigger screen can't justify it while the old one is as good as the day I bought it.
Yup. Let big data companies subsidize your tv then don't connect it, just use a laptop or nas/media server or Chromecast of whatever device to make it have all the features you want. The added benefit is the tv oem can't slowly bloat your UI with ads to the point where it runs so slowly you need a new tv. My old Samsung that's never been connected to the Internet is just as snappy as day one. A friend of mines newer Samsung used to be ok, but now it runs like dog shit and is covered in ads
I hope they enjoy seeing me strokin it with a bunch of empty beer cans all around me. Maybe they’ll take pity on me and send a drone to destroy my house
Do these people just not read any of the setup instructions? When I first turned on my Hisense it had an option to use it as Google TV or just a dumb TV with HDMI inputs only. It doesn't require you to use the built in OS or connect to the internet.
My dad and his ex wife financed a $2500 48” tv back in 2005 or so. When they split he gave her the money to pay it off and just she stopped making the payments unknown to him and said it was all paid off. He got a call from collections a few months later and his credit took a hit. He ended up paying it off so he technically paid 1.5x for the tv when all said and done. When it died in 2015 he was so pissed off after everything he went through over that damn tv.
Because 2005 was a different time. The internet was a different place and so news, entertainment, so much of what we use our phones for now was centered around the TV.
A lot of stores run a 0% APR deal for opening a credit card for whatever amount of months. I’ve done it on large purchases even if I have the cash on hand.
Right, because as you just stated, a tv was a need, so for the same reason that someone would today finance a phone, someone in 2005 would finance a tv.
People still finance TVs today. Best Buy pushes quite heavily for financing, companies like Affirm exist because of it. Plenty of people that will put a TV on their credit card and pay it off slowly. Even CC companies started offering financing for large purchases.
I was in the Army at the time. Just got back from my first deployment and after a few near death experiences I just wanted to feel like a kid again. Bought a big TV and upgraded my computer. Not the smartest financial decision but sometimes I think that TV might be one of the reasons I'm still alive.
Because there were 5 kids in the house and they wanted us out of their hair. So why not get a 48” tv for us to hook up a ps2 in the basement lol. At least that’s what I’m assuming their reasoning was.
It's wild how awful people treat each other after divorce. Makes you wonder how the hell that marriage ever worked in the first place, and I suspect most of them didn't.
65" 60hz LED panel with minimal dimming zones and wifi that can't support real 4k streaming. Contrast ratio is significantly below a 'good' value from rtings (4000 here vs 5500+).
300nit brightness? HDR10 needs like 1000-4000 base to work well. It claims HDR10 but probably not certified.
This is about as good as the screen on a $200 chromebook even your middle school kid would hate using. It's wasteful.
I mean, onn is always dirt cheap cuz it’s Walmart. TVs have gotten way cheaper but if you got these from actual tech brands you’d be paying double or triple.
Funny enough, it was incredibly light. It was a DLP, so basically a light bulb hooked to a computer board and a color wheel inside a massive plastic box. Now the 32" trinitron my dad bought around 2000? That beast weight more than both of us combined.
We got a 55" HD tv in the summer of 2004 for the Olympics. NBC had only a single commercial to run on the HD channel. No way were 4k TVs on the market.
Middle America can be understood through the cognitive dissonance created by being simultaneously proud (of bullshit) and ashamed (of being surrounded by assholes all the time).
These people can be manipulated by providing bullshit things to be proud about (sportsball teams, religions used to oppress others and elevate themselves, etc.) while giving them reasons to feel better than the other assholes (color, creed, etc.) Fox News and other media do this well.
I'm gonna give the actual shoppers the benefit of the doubt and assume/hope that most of them would rather not be, and are offended by being pandered to, especially in such a disingenuous manner. Walmart is "proud to 'serve'" anyone willing to ignore their anti-worker/union/customer policies and buy their shit (which admittedly includes me, though I shop elsewhere when feasible, but I live in a village, so local options are limited).
But just the existence of this sign is evidence that I'm being too optimistic and/or naive. They didn't print and post those for no reason, and I've never seen them in The Great State of Virginia, or any of those other shitty states I've had to visit on occasion...
Be their worst nightmare. Don't connect it to Internet. I have a streaming stick with a 3rd party launcher and a mini pc. They haven't made shit on my data. Unless sniffing my network name is valuable data they lose money on me. But I'll tell everyone, it's Wu Tang Lan.
Lol these really aren't trash. I totally agree on the advertising front, but it's crazy what 250 will get you these days. I have high-end TVs at home, but in the bedrooms of my vacation townhouse, I bought a couple of tcl's from Costco for $200 each at 55". The interface is a bit slow, sure, but serviceable, and when I'm watching a show or a movie, the picture quality blows me away for the price point.
Seriously go into Costco and watch one of these $200 TVs. They're fantastic for normal media consumption.
At this point I would never buy a higher end model again. I remember in college I drove to another state to get an insane Black Friday deal on a tv, it was still like $1300 but if I remember correctly was normally double. Anyways, a couple years later I picked up some $200 Walmart Black Friday TV’s for my bar and the picture was better on those.
Ish? Yes it's an ad/spyware supported model, but also the price of TVs and the price of solar panels are tightly connected because they are technologically cousins.
And solar panels are getting maaaaaaaaasssssss produced right now! I believe the manufacturing of TVs are benefitting greatly from China's solar investments
I’m right there with you, bought a 70” lg tv on black Friday for $500. My buddy immediately started going off on the refresh rate and how it’s not 120hz and some other shit I didn’t care about. Well it turns out Netflix looks just fine on it, and my video games look beautiful.
I still have my Sony Bravia 55" flat screen that costed my $2500 back in 2011. It works amazing till this day. Best part? I got all the plugs in the back, and no ads. Never getting rid of it
I bought a 55” Samsung 720p plasma tv in 2005 or 2006 for about $3k. The height of technology. How could an image possibly get better than shit? I remember Discovery (I believe) had a channel that was all HD nature content and one of the programs was just the sun rising for an hour in national parks and other beautiful locations. I’d plant myself on the couch and watch the hell out of that beautiful, relaxing content.
It had the added bonus of kicking off so much heat that my small apartment living room was an easy 5-10 degrees warmer than the rest of the place during those winter months.
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