Last weekend I went shopping for a new TV. Budget was a factor as I had hoped to keep my purchase under a grand. Hope being the key word.
I had done plenty of research on the Internet leading up to this trip to the local Circuit City. I wanted to be a little more selective in my choice of big-box retailer, but an earlier visit to a small local high-end A/V proved fruitless.
I knew exactly what CC had in stock before I arrived. I went directly to the 30” tube HD sets. My budget would not allow me (at the time) to get anything larger than 26” in something flat (LCD). I was not into the idea of another tube, I wanted something light and thin. Well I found a special tube TV that looked like a flat panel from the front and almost side. It was the Samsung SlimFit TX-R3079WH.
Its claim to fame is that it is 1/3rd thinner than competing 30” tube TV’s. Depth-wise that may be true, but the mass reduction in the back of the TV is even greater, with what seems like 2/3rd of the rear’s mass removed, making it appear like a flat screen TV attached to a small cube box about 12”x12” in the back. It’s a really smart-LOOKING form design. But as I ill point out in a sec, I think that reduction in stuff from the rear of the TV definitely affects the picture.
When I was viewing the TV at the store, I noticed a discoloration in the upper-left corner. One of the reasons I was dumping my old TV was that I had parked un-shielded speakers next to it for too long and the corners of the picture had discolored to a purple-green. This Samsung, the floor demo, had the same issue. I asked the sales person about that and he said that the demo must have been placed next to unshielded speakers just like I thought.
Well, I had read in the very extensive online customer review section of CC’s website, that about 1/3rd of the buyers of this TV had the same problem at home. The other big issue that many commentators mentioned was the bowing of the image both left and right and top and bottom. I didn’t see that kind of bowing on the store model.
So I took my chances, mostly because I like the physical form factor, especially compared to the other 30+ models in the store. This Samsung looked lighter and while much lighter than the competing models, was actually still quite hefty at 120+lbs.
My wife begrudgingly helped my bring this into the house, up some 8 stairs from the street then up to the second floor den in our house. I set it up, turned it on and to my sweaty disappointment, fond both of those dreaded characteristics mentioned by the commentors online: the bowing and the discoloration. Man was I pissed! I played with it for a night anyway, and if not for the issues mentioned above, plus the fact that the universal remote would not work my cable box… I would have kept it. I couldn’t imagine lugging the thing back to CC, nor was my wife too happy to help.
But back to CC it went. The return was painless. When looking at other TV’s, a different salesman than from the day prior told me he would have never sold me that TV for just the issues I had. He said it was a flaw in the design, that the internal speakers themselves were not properly shielded. UGH! Lessons learned: believe what you read (especially in this case with well over 100 comments and a good 60% mentioning these issues.)
Happy ending: so neither my wife nor I could imagine lugging another even bigger and heavier tube TV up the stairs, no matter what our budget was. We ended up getting a 32” Sharp Aquos LCD flat panel. It was my plan all along ;-) Kidding.
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