June 15th, 2007
More Father's Day weekend gift ideas
It’s Father’s Day weekend and I thought I’d leave a few more ideas for the weekend after yesterday’s PC builder’s guide. Yes I know I didn’t cover Mother’s Day and I’m sorry to all the Mother’s out there. I promise I’ll make it up next year though I’m no expert on that subject matter. I read an article in this past year that women were becoming as excited about electronic gifts as they are about jewelry though I wish someone would inform my wife that. But let me get back to the matter at hand.
- 42″ Sceptre 1920×1080 1080p HDTV for $1300 (includes shipping). There are lots of pretenders out there that say they’re 1080p but give you some odd-ball resolution of 1024 by 1080 and they stretch 1024 pixels out to fill the width of 1920 pixels. There are also 1366×768 or even 1024×768 resolution so-called HDTV flat panels in the market that really aren’t much cheaper. Well forget about the pretenders if you’re in the market for an HDTV. This true 1080p resolution LCD HDTV supports NTSC, ATSC, and QAM. Note that NTSC is regular TV compatibility, ATSC is HDTV over the air, and QAM is for digital cable. Heck you can even use this as a massive computer monitor (with DVI to HDMI cable) doubling as an HDTV set in the bedroom or dorm. It would be the perfect monitor for this Enthusiast PC.
- Dell 30″ LCD monitor with 2560×1600 resolution for $1269 (including shipping). 30″ is the biggest and highest resolution computer monitor you can buy short of trying to use an HDTV like the one above for a monitor. Now some people might be wondering why not just go for the 42″ model above if it’s around the same price. Well as good as the 42″ LCD HDTV is and while it’s one of the few TVs on the market that can serve as a computer monitor, the quality isn’t going to be as exquisite as a good computer display.
- 500 GB Seagate SATA-300 hard drive retail box (5 year warrantee) for $110 (pickup only).
Interestingly, the bottom seems to have fallen out of the RAM market as well as the projection HDTV market. I went through the local electronics super store and 70″ DLP HDTVs that had sold for $5000 less than a year ago were now dropped to a little over $2000. I’d sure hate to have been the person that bought one a year ago or worse, the retailer holding on to excess inventory. Since LCD and Plasma display prices were so attractive now, there is no way anyone would ever buy a projection model for around the same price.
George Ou is Technical Director of ZDNet. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
