DEBORAH CROMBIE: This is what happened at our house on Saturday night.
One minute, there was a normal picture, then this! With no warning, the TV was suddenly toast. I was astonished when we looked back through our records and realized it was eight years old. This started me thinking about how our home entertainment expectations have changed over the years. (Remember when we called them television sets?)
We went from the huge cabinets with tiny screens of the fifties and sixties, to TVs that would fit on a stand. Then we started to hide them. One of our first really big furniture purchases when we moved into our house in the mid-nineties was a beautiful cherry entertainment cabinet for the TV. It fit to the left of our fireplace (where you can see the antique mirror in the photo above.) When the door was opened, the shelf that held the TV could be pulled out a few inches, then swiveled for better viewing. Of course, the door was hardly ever closed, so all the fancy furniture to make the TV invisible didn't do much good! (We don't have a den, by the way, so the living room is the only option other than the small TV in our kitchen.)
Then, in the mid-2000s, the first flat screen TVs began to be available at (sort of) reasonable prices, and of course one was a must for my techie husband.
I was horrified! You want to put that ugly thing over my beautiful fireplace? And it's huge! I liked the painting we had in that spot, too. Rick actually cut out a cardboard template to show me how much space a 50" TV would take up, and of course I gave in. That was the plasma screen, which lasted almost ten years. Then, the inches crept up to 55 with the LCD flat screen that just went kaput, and now I never even think about the fact that this screen is the predominant thing in our living room. In fact, the empty wall looks very weird.
Who knows what we'll end up with this time, but in any case, an unexpected merry Christmas to us! Ouch!
REDS and readers, how does the TV/home entertainment fit into your house? Do you take the central screen for granted?
