Tag Archives: HDMI

As expected…

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I didn’t have high hopes for my test run with the indoor antenna. Since I live 40 miles from the nearest TV transmitter and there’s plenty of hills and trees in that distance, the antenna was a hail Mary play. Being that I’m only out $7, it wasn’t too costly an experiment. Unfortunately, the antenna failure led me to contemplate Plan B… kit the two small TVs in my bedroom and upstairs living room with Apple TV boxes and stream content as needed. Sadly, Plan B has also hit a snag. A snag in which both small TVs are so old that neither one has the required HDMI port. There are ways around that, of course, but none of them are particularly good. So that leaves us with Plans C and D.

Plan C is to replace the TVs – probably a $400 total expense since I’m looking at the sub-32″ class for both units. Add the two Apple TV units and the startup cost should be right at $600. Getting rid of two cable boxes would get me off the hook to Comcast for approximately $20 a month… so in 2.5 years, option C pays for itself, except for the part where technology has improved in the interrum and upgrades need to be made. Plan D, of course, is to do nothing at all and just learn to enjoy the pucker every time I get my e-bill from the cable company. I know what I want to do, but maybe after Thanksgiving the numbers will start to look a little more palatable.

TV Time…

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I had a good plan. No, seriously. I really did have a good plan. The 42 inch TV currently in the living room was going to the basement “media room”. This new venue should be more conducive to reducing glare and cutting my cooling bill this summer. Hiding in the basement when it’s a gagillion degrees in July and August just seems to make more sense than running the 18,000 BTU window unit flat out for weeks on end. Moving the TV was easy enough and I had a small TV packed away that would be more than sufficient for background noise when I happened to be in the kitchen or fiddling around upstairs. What I didn’t account for was that nice little TV having only a single set of old school standard component cable connections, so I can plug in the cable box or the DVD player, but not both at the same time. And forget plugging in anything fancy like Apple TV or XBox. Apparently, this TV has been in storage for a while. I didn’t even know they made flat panels without HDMI ports.

This leaves me in a bit of a dilema. I can leave things as they are, with the TV in the basement and nothing in the upstairs living room. I can plug in the baby TV in the living room and try using it as what’s basically a radio with moving pictures. Or I can bight the bullet and head over to Delaware this afternoon and try finding a new TV that doesn’t send me screaming to the poor house.

The part of me that loves shiny new toys really wants to put the 42 inch TV back in the living room and bring home a 50 inch screen for the basement. The part of me that just finished paying the bill for moving here really, really wants to avoid doing that. The compromise might have to be finding a no-frills (read: cheap) 32 inch model for the living room and letting things in the basement be for the time being. It can’t hurt to stop in at Best Buy and have a look, right? I mean, since I have to go to Petsmart and pick up dog food anyway, it only makes sense to look around a bit.