If you haven't shopped for a new TV lately, you probably don't know that the stores don't carry very many normal TVs anymore. By normal, I mean your standard, chunky concoction of plastic and glass that we have all used in our living rooms and bedrooms for decades. All they seem to carry is flat screen LCD's and plasmas. If you can't afford them, too bad. That's all you get to choose from.My mom had wanted to get my nephew a bigger TV for his room to play his video games on. Right now he just has a 13 inch that's hard to see when you're sitting on the bunk bed across the room. The TV also lacks A/V inputs so he's constantly having to switch back and forth from cable to his X-box using an A/B switch. She was looking for just your standard, cheap, 19 inch TV with the A/V inputs in front so she wouldn't have to worry about Chandler pulling the TV down on himself every time he wanted to switch the X-box out for a DVD player, his Hyperscan, or the Wii. What she found instead were not-so-cheap LCDs. Granted, the LCDs are a lot less expensive than they used to be, and they're still cheaper than plasmas; they're just not as cheap as what Best Buy is now calling "tube televisions."
She didn't want to spend several hundred dollars on a TV so she decided to wait until after Christmas to see if Walmart or anyone else for that matter would get the tubes in stock. I checked online for her, but even places like Best Buy only carry a handful of regular TV's now. I know the world is moving to this big digital transition in February, but the last time I checked, you can still use tube televisions with cable, satellite, or a converter box, so what gives with the limited supply? I'm sure most people would love to have a room in their homes big enough to have a huge LCD mounted on the wall, theater seating, and surround sound, like one of those Extreme Makeover houses, but in this economy most of us would just settle for a comfy couch and a decent, affordable tube version sitting squarely on the TV stand or armoire in front of us. So why have the TV makers stopped catering to us? And where did all the normal TV's go, to some tube TV graveyard in the sky?
Regardless of the answer, I told my mom that Chandler could just borrow one of my sets when I ever move. My Magnavox Smartbox sets all have the A/V inputs in front, not to mention better pictures than the newer TVs in my house. The one in my bedroom--the one that I've had since law school and that's about 10 years old--has the best picture of all. I wonder if all these fancy flat screens have the same longevity.
