DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

After monitoring the plasma television market for 18 months, we saw the price drop we were waiting for. Your local appliance chain might have you believe a name-brand 42'' plasma TV costs $3300, but you can find significantly better prices online. With all the money you save, you can treat your local appliance-chain TV salesman to a nice dinner in hopes he gets over his apoplexy.

Yes, he will spin you some disturbing tales about off-market goods, poor warranties, and disreputable dealers. I had one salesman try to talk me out of a specific model with a claim that it emits unsafe levels of radiation.

Here is a sample cost comparison, demonstrating the advantages of buying consumer electronics online:

I was briefly tempted by a floor demo from Magnolia Hi-Fi (a regional chain). The store was asking $2500 for a 42'' Samsung. The only real drawback is that it had been in use, 12 hours/day, 7 days/week for at least three months, enduring button-pushing and tire-kicking from sticky-fingered home theater tourists along the way. As a percentage of a plasma TV’s lifetime, these 1100 hours of use are not significant, but on the other hand those floor-demo hours are equivalent to seven years’ worth of my projected usage (i.e. roughly 1.5 movies per week).

Our selection criteria seemed simple enough:

• 42'' screen
• EDTV, not HDTV — we’ll use it only for DVDs and old videotapes
• no built-in speakers
• no gray-market products or mystery brands

Numerous investigative forays into google led me to the Panasonic TH-42PWD6UY. It met all our criteria. It benefits from several positive reviews (1, 2) which for all I know were written by the Panasonic marketing department — that’s one of the risks of doing research online. A website that appears to be authoritative might be run by a shill. Then again, the same thing could be said of the sales staff at your local big-box retailer. I also found a review for the TH-42PA20U, which uses the same plasma module, at CNET.

The TH-42PWD6UY is sold as a “commercial” unit, intended for office rather than home use. It’s really a monitor rather than a television. It costs hundreds less than the home unit, because of numerous differences, all of which were acceptable if not favorable for our application.

• The commercial unit has no in-home warranty; Panasonic intends its business customers to bring these plasma displays to an authorized service center for repair. Third-party warranties can cover this deficiency.
• The commercial unit has no (NTSC) television tuner. Our VCR does, though, so this seemed irrelevant, especially given that our next scheduled television usage is on 10 February 2006 (the Winter Olympics in Turin).
• The commercial unit does not include a stand, although it can be purchased separately, as can the wall-mount kit.
• The commercial unit has a more basic remote-control. Presumably this is because there’s no need to control the missing TV tuner and internal speakers. Third-party universal remotes seem to provide a superior solution anyway.
• The commercial version has different input bays. I thought this would be a problem, but it’s not: this plasma unit has enough inputs for a DVD player, a VCR, and a computer. Also, this display has an expansion slot, to enable additional inputs (e.g. DVI).
• The commercial version is rated Class A by the FCC because it emits a higher level of electromagnetic interference than does the home model (Class B). This is the characteristic misunderstood by the salesman who wanted to sell me a $4000 plasma, for my health. I’ll write more about EMI in a future update.
• The commercial unit has no built-in speakers. I find this to be an advantage; built-in TV speakers are likely to be inferior in size and quality to any stand-alone stereo, even the cheesy sub/sat “multimedia” system that’s holding a place for my next home-theater upgrade, a six-figure, all-tube, 7.1 fiberoptic digital high-current speaker extravaganza that’s mixed in “Dubly.”

Our current television is a 20'' tube, purchased in 1995 for about $300. I’d wager we’ve spent less on televisions over the years than anybody we know. But we’ve made up for that now…