It’s really very simple. My wife and I don’t care much for going out to see movies. We like movies. It’s just that to go out means finding a sitter, finding a movie, getting tickets, standing in line to pick up tickets, standing in line to buy overpriced popcorn and a soda, and finally sitting in an uncomfortable chair in a large room with at least one very rude asshole who doesn’t realize where he or she is. There is always the talking on the phone or more recently the texting with backlights ruining the view of the movie. It’s an overly complicated algorithm for a software designer that just wants things to work. So instead we bought a TV.
The purchase was rather unplanned. We left the house thinking we would brave the movie theater. It was two months after our baby was born and I think our first date night in too long to remember. We went to dinner first – a hole in the wall Italian place my wife likes. Over dinner we talked about what movie we would see. By the time we were half finished we had talked ourselves out of going to the movies and instead were going to purchase a TV. I don’t care much for television, and our previous set was circa 1970 so we are not exactly keeping up with technology in this arena. I’m sure new TVs run some sort of software that someone designs, it’s just that I personally can’t do much with it so I don’t really care.
We end up at the Best Buy. I don’t think anyone ever sets out to go to the Best Buy, it’s just were you end up. I started at the Sears. After twenty or thirty minutes of waiting for someone to show up to sell a TV I decided my interests would be better served else where. Next was Costco Home. In retrospect we should have stopped there with a Samsung, but we thought we could find a better deal. So we end up at Best Buy. Toshiba is a name I recognized, but I don’t know much about TVs, so it looked nice and that was all I cared about. The TV was a little small but we had a small budget considering the newborn, and we were saving for a house. It’s a TV though and TVs live for years. It looks good, it’s an LCD so it’s about the right size for the bedroom when we ultimately upgrade to something bigger in our as yet – at the time – unknown living room. It all made sense.
The model we purchased was the Toshiba 32AV500U. It’s a 32 inch LCD. I actually really liked this TV right up until Saturday afternoon when it just stopped having a picture. Apparently several others have had the same problem based on a little Googling. I guess the problem is somewhere in the backlighting circuit. The picture is completely gone but there is still sound. It’s only 13 months old, one month past the warranty end date. So I guess Toshiba is really good at calculating MTBF so that they don’t have to do anything for you. Toshiba is now on my list of manufactures that I will never purchase from again. They join HP – a computer my parents purchased that never worked from day one, and Sony – for their quite amazing DVD player that could not quite figure out how to play DVDs.
So anyway don’t buy this. It’s bad. In fact I would recommend not buying anything from Toshiba until they start fixing their quality, offering a warranty that reflects it, and stop mistreating their customers. I won’t. Now I have to go figure out which Samsung I can afford. The Samsung LN52A750 52-Inch
