Just a basic comparison of what I could buy with my little budget as an amateur and learning photographer in today’s world of DSLRs.

I like the following brands and hence have included them only.

For instance, take the “Paste and go” feature available upon copying and then right clicking your mouse to paste on it in the address bar. It would usually take two clicks. One to paste and one to click the go button. This is where I was happy to see the Paste and go option which basically reduces the whole task to one click.

While this feature might seem minuscule in the context I have provided we should not forget that the substance of one’s work is usually in the details. In my view if the team at Google has given a thought about this issue then they surely must have taken care of the more prominent ones that lack from the other respected browsers.

Don’t get me wrong the Chrome is not all good UI implementations. In fact I was hoping they would go with Firefox and not with IE on the whole show/hide main controls (File, Edit etc.) on the top of the page. Maybe version 2 would have it!

PS: I am not well versed with safari and opera and hence have left it out of my post.

Handy website!

The logistics was handled by Eagle/CEVA and they called up and gave us a time range of 9 to 1. It was delivered around 12:30. I was happy with the way everything was handled and would definetely recommend Amazon/CEVA after my experiences.

Note: CEVA delivery guys said that even though Amazon promises white glove delivery which includes setting up the TV on its pedestal CEVA does not authorize them to do it. It was not tough to get it on to the pedestal but I was a bit curious to know why Amazon doesn’t mention this online.

Now, off to picking the best cable/satellite packages …

Sony KDL-46Z4100

Let me start off by saying that my previous TV set was a 27″ CRT from Panasonic. It was a great TV that I had purchased 5 years ago on sale for $190 at Circuit City. It still amazes me that after 5 moving (inter/intra cities and states) and after 4 TV stands this set stands like a rock (No really! It is that heavy).

Anyway, my quest started off with the first question that almost anyone would have at the beginning. Plasma vs. LCD. After reading tons of articles, comments and reviews on this subject I concluded that both were superior technologies and one couldn’t go wrong choosing either one. It was a personal choice then.

Contradictory to my opinion “personal choice” really isn’t that easy as it sounds. This being my first HDTV I had a whole bunch of questions creating chaos in my mind with zero answers to fight them off.

My requirements list looked something like this:

• Budget < $2000 (incl. tax, shipping and other basic cables)
• Size > 40″ but less than 50″
• Preferred the best or second best brands in that technology. This is usually debatable but my choices were pretty clear with Sony and Samsung as one and two for LCDs and Pioneer and Panasonic for Plasma’s respectively.
• Low power consumption
• Low heat emissions
• Deep blacks (as much as possible)
• Reasonably good speakers
• 120 Hz for a LCD

Luckily, some very personal choices like low electricity consumption and less heat emissions nailed my choice to a LCD pretty quickly.

So I started looking in to the Sony and Samsung lineups. Amazon had certain TVs with 5 stars based on 400+ reviewers. But once I checked them out at Fry’s it was clear that they had a reflection problem. My living room has two huge windows and that would make it impossible to ignore it. Even otherwise when I looked at a Sony and its Samsung counter-part it was pretty clear that Sony was way ahead in clarity (No, I do not own a single Sony product).

From that point I concentrated solely on finding the best possible Sony for my budget and other requirements. In about an hour it was clear that the XBR line-ups were out of my price range. So I started delving into the Z-series which is the top of the line non-XBR set from Sony. In fact I think Sony never made a 46″+ on this series to avoid XBR’s sales drop. The S-series seemed to lack many of today’s technology and the W-series was just today’s technology that would be outdated in six months. The V-series fit somewhere in between. So clearly Z-series was the one.

My research made it easy to narrow down the retailers to Costco and Amazon. This is heavily biased and can be debatable again. For that very reason it is pointless to list my reasons on picking these retailers here.

Costco seemed to promote Sharp, Samsung and Vizio and hardly had Sony in its lineup. Amazon on the other hand had the Z-series for a huge discount (30% for the black which was my preference). While I debated and kept reading articles on the “best time to buy a HDTV” it became clearer that the answer could only be “when you are ready to buy”. So I placed the order on Amazon.com

I am waiting for my set to arrive. Will update on the experience once I get through it.

Since most of it was Microsoft based technologies (Windows server, SQL Server and .NET framework included) it makes sense to point fingers at Redmond, WA unless of course the IT department at LSE was incompetent.