USA Today Discovers It’s a Good Time to Buy a TV

29Nov/110

USA Today Discovers It’s a Good Time to Buy a TV

USA Today, the US’ national newspaper, has discovered what we’ve been calling the Golden Age for buying a TV set. In an article called “TV bargains abound this holiday shopping season,” reporter Mike Snider says the hunt for a low-priced HDTV should be as easy as shooting fish in a barrelthis shopping season.

He credits several factors for creating a confluence of market pressures that make this a great time to buy a TV set:

- Economic woes made consumers hesitate so far this year about buying big-ticket items.

- Inventories are high.

- The era of TV sets as we’ve known them has ended. The 2012 models that are coming are mostly smart TVs, and consumers will soon no longer want to buy “dumb” sets that don’t connect to the Net for entertainment, information and social networking.

To Martin’s list we add a) TV set makers until recently have not reduced the quantity of sets that they are making to meet the reduced demand, b) 3D sets have not been the boom market — the must-have product that set makers and studios expected, c) store-front retailers have found they have to cut prices sharply and offer free shipping to the home to compete with the online giant Amazon and d) consumers want to upgrade their flat panel set to a larger size. (Ever hear anyone complain that the size of the TV screen was too big?)

We expect the pricing pressures to cause one or more of the well-known TV makers to opt out of making TV sets in the next 12 to 18 months.

Bargains abound, the article points out:
- Best Buy, under intense pressure from Walmart and Amazon, has a 42-inch Sharp 1080p LCD set at $199.99, a Dynex 24-inch LCD TV for $79.99 and a 55-inch LG 1080p LCD display with LED-backlighting for $897.99.
- Target has a 40-inch Emerson LCD HDTV for $265 and a 46-inch Westinghouse LCD TV for $298
- Walmart has 32-inch and 40-inch Emerson LCD HDTVs for $188 and $248, respectively, plus a 43-inch Samsung plasma HDTV for $398.

As to quality, the article quotes Al Griffin, technical editor for Sound & Vision magazine, as saying, “Plasma still retains an edge over LCD” when it comes to brightness of even the darkest images and uniformity of the picture. However, the best LED-backlit LCD displays “can give plasma a run for its money” — usually the expensive ones with a full-array backlight. Plus LED LCD sets use much less power than plasma sets.

The average selling price for a flat panel TV has fallen from $935 in 2007 to $545 now, according to the Consumer Electronics Association.

Now is the time to buy a TV! If it’s not a smart TV, then get a smart TV adapter like Apple TV if you want to play the tunes and playlists that are on your PC, a Logitech Revue to add Google TV technology to the set, an LG Upgrader that offers all the popular apps or any one of several others.