Does it look any better?
In spite of my best intentions to avoid purchasing more, new electronic equipment, I’m being dragged into the vortex. For the last couple of weeks, every time I go to use one of our “good old” appliances, things tend to go wrong. I’m replacing stuff far too often for my budget or my best intentions.
Today, I thought I’d get off cheaply with the replacement of a low-end DVD player. No big deal, I can afford that. I should have known better. We’ve been a museum of older televisions with no digital inputs; feeding a DVD player through a VHS works. Except that today, the VHS also decided to go on strike, with a case of intermittent functionality. The price of yet another VHS brought pause; maybe we should shop for a new TV.
Of course, there is a budget to respect, so no home cinema today. Instead, I now own a smallish LCD with lots of inputs. Component, S-Video, Composite, RF… my bases are covered. I’m back to a multiple blipper existence, but one TV in the place is now HD ready. When everything goes to basic black sometime in the next couple of years, I’ll be able to watch the news. Meanwhile, I have a widescreen with a new DVD player hanging off the back. The sound is better, the image is larger and brighter (my eyes do appreciate the difference) and I have more junk to try and sneak into the recycling bins.
I’ve spent time trying different cabling combinations, and the various menus on the various devices are no longer a mystery. Time to see if there are firmware upgrades; that’s what crazy people do to new appliances, isn’t it? I have found the magic “zoom” button on one of the remotes so the black bars on the side of the screen have gone away. Where do they go, in passing? I even have a cable to use it as a second computer monitor, although the screen is not anywhere near a computer right now. Future expansion.
I’ve spent some money, and some poor sales person made a few dollars in the commission game today. I guess that means I’m doing my part as a cog in the consumer gearbox.
