Quote Originally Posted by topspeed
Wooch,

My friend, you've been talking about upgrading your monitor to HD for a year and a half now! Bite the bullet man! Once you come to the realization that whatever you buy is going to be outdated as soon as you get it calibrated, it's a lot easier to make the leap ! j/k. I feel ya on the video upgrade. Our new monitor led to a new hd/dvr and universal player. All said and done, the $2,200 tv eventually ended up costing me another $1,500 in front end upgrades! Domino effect: it sucks.
Believe me, if it was only the monitor upgrade (and if I was the only one deciding), I would have done it a long time ago! Somewhere along the way though, that HDTV fund got turned into a low-voltage track lighting fund, then a patio cover fund, and now it's magically morphed into a retaining wall fund (and while we're at it, there's also the sofa/loveseat fund, and the dreaded new car fund that it might morph into next!).

In addition to those front and back end costs (to do HD/progressive, I got the satellite box and DVD player to upgrade from the outset, plus I want to do the entire video chain using HDMI connections), I got the WAF to consider as well. My better half has already declared no big ugly boxy TVs in the living room (which limits the HD options to flat panels or front projection), and she also wants more hideaway storage for all of those DVDs that I keep buying (and stacking along the wall, because adding more "ugly" standalone DVD racks is out of the question). So, this means that I'll be adding a new Salamander rack with the media drawer add-ons (I plan to eventually use that rack as a flat panel stand) before I even get around to deciding on a HDTV! Ah, the eternal bliss of matrimony!

Talk about dominoes falling -- my technophobe parents wound up getting a HDTV before I did! (They're in the half of American households with the blinking 12's on their VCR and no clue how to program one of those things for recording) Shockingly, they went all out by getting a 50" plasma with a built-in HD-DVR (of course, I had to program everything for them before coming back to the Bay Area)! Once again, it was the woman of the house that drove that decision -- my mom wanted a big picture, but did not want the image to "disappear" when sitting off to the side, while my dad would have been fine with a hulking rear projection console. That HDTV is major overkill for the stuff that my parents play on it (mostly broadcast channels on cable and some DVDs), but it makes them happy and with 24-months interest-free and a paid-off mortgage (a VERY nice place to be, considering that they bought the house for $60k some 30+ years ago), the cost takes only a small chunk out of their social security checks!