Buying a TV isn’t what it used to be

If you’ve finally decided to buy your first television set out of your own pocket, don’t expect to have the same experience as your parents had when they bought one before. As a kid, you may remember going to the appliance store and looking at bulky model after bulky model, with much larger ones possibly taking up half the room.

Your parents’ only concerns are possibly the actual size of the TV and how much it costs. Things were much easier back then, if a bit more expensive and bulkier. This is because old TV’s usually run on color tubes, and the larger the screen, the bigger the tube. This means that you probably have to free up a cube of space that had dimensions as large as the screen itself. Larger TVs could cost up to thousands of dollars and had to be lifted into your home by at least three people.

TVs in the internet age

But if you go out to buy a TV now, you might be surprised to see that your considerations are no longer limited to screen size, dimensions and costs. If you’re a smart buyer, you might realize that buying a TV now is like buying mobile phone. There are so many things it can do, especially if it’s a SMART TV, that you simply have to know just what you want your TV to do. Before, a TV was just supposed to get all the channels clearly and connect to your disc player. Now, you can surf the web, play games and do so much more on your TV

Aside from capabilities, you also don’t have to worry about space. LED and LCD displays have very flat dimensions, which even allow them to be mounted to the wall very easily. You’d hardly be able to find any color tube models that are made brand new in the market today, as the cheaper and prettier tech of flat screens have taken over.

So how far apart are color tubes and SMART TVs?

If you put the biggest color tube model and the SMART TV next to each other, you could easily see how different they are:

• A color tube model takes up more space. You have to make space for the tube that’s at the back of the TV. LED and LCD TVs are quite slim and are better mounted on the wall for security and space saving.

• A SMART TV has more ports and connectors at the back. Before, you’d have to disconnect the plug for your VCR or DVD player at the front or back of the color tube. Now, you have two USB ports, an HDMI port and possibly a VGA connector for your SMART TV. This means that you can put in your flash drives, portable HDs and even use the TV as an alternate or extended display for your PC.

• A SMART TV connects to the internet. Color tubes are made to watch shows on while SMART TVs are actual computers. This means that you can check your mail, make and receive video calls through VoIP and even play web games on Facebook through your TV. A SMART TV can do anything a color tube model can do, and then some.

• Power usage for a color tube is always higher than a flat screen TV. The color tube uses up more power because bombarding ions to change the screen takes more power than changing the colors on the diodes on a flat screen