With undying faith that size is everything — at least when it comes to television sets — Vizio, a producer of consumer electronics, has introduced a 120-inch LCD TV.
The company recently invited news media people to observe with awe what must be the largest television set to be hung on a wall, in a large hotel show room in Las Vegas. Vizio brags about its superior colors and sound qualities.
The Vizio monster joined other out-sized TV sets in the 2014 electronics show, including a 110-inch set from Samsung Electronics, expected to cost an incredible $160,000. How many seniors could afford that price?
My wife and I are not against “big.” In fact, in 2004, we bought an extra-large television set for our family room. We wanted to see clearly and in detail all the football games, because we are both big fans of the game. We always have referred to that big set fondly as our “big-butt” TV. It has a mere 51-inch screen. That’s half the size of the new Vizio model. We have another TV in the wet bar and one in our bedroom. These two are of more traditional size.
Bigger is sometimes better, depending on what you’re talking about. An old friend who lives in Natchez and has visited us in years past talked with me recently by phone. He asked, chuckling, if we still had “that tiny TV in our family room.”
It does stand out, but we’re used to it. We believe it is plenty big enough for us. The huge Vizio set has not revealed its price or exactly when the behemoth will be available to those who want really big and who can afford the monster.
The techies at the electronics show said the new Vizio weighs 400 pounds. A Vizio engineer, James Kittle, said the huge flat-panel set at that weight would “test many walls.” In brightness and sound, it promised a new world.
The Los Angeles Times, reporting on the big consumer electronics show noted that although “big TVs grab headlines. They’re drawing shrugs from customers. Consumer spending on technology has been mostly flat in recent years.”
The Consumer Electronics Association, which hosted the show, projected global consumer spending on technology will drop one percent in 2014. “Consumers mainly are buying Smartphone and tablets “now 66 percent of all such spending,” the report said.
Strolling through the aisles of the show, attendees passed a wide range of hardware start-up hopefuls. There were holographic displays; new 3-D printers; and a pet webcam which lets pet owners talk to their pets when they’re not at home, along with a panoramic camera ball that can be tossed into the air and take 360 degree pictures. Makes you dizzy to think about it.
The rise of inexpensive, but powerful 3-D printers, that permit fast prototyping of products, has put design tools — once the exclusive domain of big companies – into the hands of the little guy.
But, back to television – we’ve come a long way since my family first bought a TV set when I was a kid. We bought it to see the nominating convention of Dwight Eisenhower in 1952. It was a small black and white set, of course, with “rabbit ears” antenna.
Much later, after I was married and had offspring, we had a color TV to see the news and a few favorite shows.
Unlike today, when every child expects to have his or her own TV set in their own room, our one set when our sons were growing up was monitored, even though there was not the river of violence and sexual content in those days.
We’ve come a long way in broadcast matter and TV size, little of which has contributed much, if anything, to our culture in my opinion.
Tait Trussell is an old guy and fourth-generation professional journalist who writes extensively about aging issues among a myriad of diverse topics.