Wed 15 Dec 2010
Bought A New 55″ LED 3-D TV
Posted by RichSlick under Cascading Expenses, Raves
[2] Comments
So Costco has a great bundle that includes a Samsung 55″ 3D 240hz LED TV w/ free BluRay player and 3-D starter kit for a little over $2,000 and I couldn’t help but pick one up.  I took it home and setup it up and the picture is simply amazing.  The screen is so large that it actually overpowers the room it’s in and the images are so lifelike that it looks like the people on the screen are actually in my family room!   I was watching the nightly news with Brian Williams and could see the wrinkles in explicit detail along with a horrible makeup job.  Sorry Brian, I love your nightly newscast but your makeup people need to step it up a bit!
There are a few complaints I have about Samsung.  First, neither the BluRay nor the TV came with an HDMI cable and for two grand, you’d expect the right cable to be included in either box.  The problem is that there are so many freaking HDMI cables to choose from it’s getting harder to decipher what you need without an engineering degree.  A coworker told me to be sure to get a version 1.4 HDMI cable to make sure it works with my 3-D TV.
Next, while my BluRay player has built in WiFi, the TV does not have WiFi.  I actually had to shell out another $80 to buy a Samsung Wireless Link adapter for the TV.  Why didn’t this have it built in to the TV? I haven’t yet had time to play with the Apps or even Netflix but that brings me to my next point: complication!
As features and functionality get better, it is also increasing the complexity of setting up a TV as now I have to enter a 200 character WiFi encryption key with a 10 button remote!  As always, it’s almost impossible to use a single remote either!
My biggest complaint is the lack of and cost of 3D BluRay movies.  Take a look at the short list of movies available in 3-D here.  There were a few movies at retail outlets selling for $40! Yikes!  Come on guys, $40 for a movie when a comparable DVD is under $20?
Lastly, the Samsung 3-D glasses cost $150 EACH. Yes, that’s right, it costs $150 for 3-D glasses so a family of four will spend $600 just on glasses!  Of course, I got two “free” but that still means I need to spend another $300 on glasses and god forbid if one pair gets damaged!
It’s all pretty ridiculous but I’ve got money to burn now that I’m not spending $6,000 traveling thanks to the TSA molestation policy this year so the money has to go somewhere and it may as well go to Korean manufacturers instead of American workers.