Mostly Harmless

According to my online credit card statement I bought three copies of World of Warcraft from the Blizzard Entertainment online store last Saturday. From three different states.

And I apparently bought a copy of [City of Heroes|City of Villains|Auto Assault] (or some other $20 item from NC Soft) a couple of days later.

All of this was news to me.

The guy at Blizzard claims that someone would need a valid account number, expiration date, name, billing zip code and security code in order to make a purchase from their online store. Either he’s full of crap or someone else’s online store is not so secure. I generally use my check card for local purchases so the card in question is rarely out of my pocket.

So now I await the arrival of a new Chase credit card. I’m sure that the Discover Card folks appreciate me for using their card for the first time in years. What they don’t know is that they won’t see any interest charges from me since I pay off my card(s) every month. Suckers.

Now I have to find and reschedule all the automatic payments I had on the old card. Grrrr.

So the HDTV did eventually arrive, about 10 days after I ordered it. I’ve been too busy watching hi-def TV to update the blog (also I am lazy). (And yes there was a hole in the box but the TV was unscathed.)

Since the DVR only holds about 8 hours worth of HD I simply must watch each day’s recordings immediately so I can delete them and make space for the next day. Busy, busy.

Side note: How freakin’ awesome was Heroes this week? Woo!

BTW, now I’ve got three DVRs, so if I really put my mind to it I can record 5 shows simultaneously (TiVo, ReplayTV, Comcast HD x 2, & Formac DVR tuner/encoder). The Comcast DVR is the primary box now though, so primetime HD shows are recorded there, then the Replay will record various lo-def shows from the other digital cable box. I haven’t un-programmed a lot of shows on the Replay so there is some overlap, which is nice when the Comcast box decides to go mental.

Mini-rant
This just chaps my ass: I recorded the Daytona 500 so I could get Kelly’s 3-song performance just before the race. Once that was over I attempted to stop the recording so I wouldn’t have to waste space on disk with the actual race. Apparently, because I was using both tuners, when I hit ’stop’ on the remote the only options I got were “stop and delete recorded segment” and “cancel” (i.e. continue recording). Which was… not useful. The other tuner was recording the race on the standard definition channel, just in case they set the no-copy flag on the show, so I couldn’t stop either show for the full 5 1/2 hours, for fear of losing the only part of the recording that I cared about.

Happily they didn’t protect the show and later I pulled the HD video off of the box over Firewire. It was 720p instead of 1080p so that single 5 1/2 hour recording only took up 35% of the space on the DVR.

Anywho, the TV is nice but lacking in the sound department. I’ve got an old powered subwoofer from my last set of computer speakers attached and filling out the bass. Every once in a while it makes high-pitched squealing noises because something in the amp is dying, which reminds me why I replaced it…

So just minutes ago I placed an order, I think, for a refurbished Onkyo HT-S590 5.1 speaker system. After I hit submit the confirmation page said “* Error, order not processed.” without a clue as to why. Yet I did get an e-mail confirmation so I’ll check the order status later and see if it actually exists.

The HT-S590 is a basic 5.1 HTIB and my refurb price with 2-day shipping (including $10 Club Onkyo discount) is about $160. Can’t beat that with a stick. I was tempted to go for a higher model # but all I wanted was a small-ish, cheap-ish, decent sounding system. The S790 is a nice midrange 7.1 system but twice as big and twice the price for the refurb, or 3x the price, new. If I’m going to spend a few hundred for a speaker system I’ll do more shopping, and probably go for the “even more better” HT-S894 ($599) or HT-S990THX ($749). So since I don’t want to spend $600 now I went with the “buck sixty” model. When I get a really big HDTV set I’ll go for the really good speakers. My current system is like a HD starter set.

Oh yeah: www.shoponkyo.com

Let’s talk about HDTV cables and how just about everybody wants you to pay $99 for a 6′ HDMI cable.

I don’t think so.

I suppose those Monster cables are very nice and all, but fuck you very much if you think I’m paying $99-$129 to get a digital TV signal 6 feet.

The cheapest HDMI cables I saw in town were $65, with component video cables going for $34. Comcast will give you one set of component cables along with your HDTV cable box, but I’ve got a couple of devices to hook up. I’ll use their cable for the ReplayTV DVR and my new $18 HDMI cable for the Comcast DVR.

Monoprice.com has crazy good prices on cables. Crazy. Good. And they actually ship when they say they’re going to! It’s like how a reputable company is run, unlike LCDTVs.com (those bastards).

From Monoprice I got a 10′ Firewire cable, 6′ HDMI cable, and 10′ VGA cable, shipped via 2-day air, for $38. The shipping was $13 of that total and the HDMI cable was one of the higher quality cables — they have some $6 HDMI cable too if you want to be really cheap.

I just noticed the 8″ Port Saver cable for $3.78. It’s a 28 gauge cable that’s more flexible than the jacketed 24 gauge cable I have. I think my non-bendy HDMI cable will be sticking out of the side of the TV by a noticeable amount so one of those might be a good idea.

The VGA cable is to run computer video to the TV. I don’t know how much I’ll use that. Right now I’m sitting two feet away from a 20″ monitor running at 1680×1050; so 1366×768 on a 32″ screen several feet away won’t necessarily rock my world. I may use it for watching DVDs via the computer if I’m too lazy to move the regular DVD player over, or buy a fancy up-converting model.

The firewire cable is for pulling raw HD off of the DVR, of course. That’s the only real HD video I’ve seen so far. I can’t pull the premium channels like HBO HD off of the DVR via Firewire because of the DRM so I’ll need a real TV to watch that in 720p or 1080i, but the HD channels still look pretty good over S-Video through my DV encoder. (”pretty good” means: better than standard definition digital cable re-encoded with mpeg-2 and encoded yet again into DV and shown on an LCD computer monitor.)

Once the TV is actually here I may discover that I need to snag a few more cables from Monoprice. I don’t have any optical Toslink cable, for instance. $5 for 12 feet sounds pretty good compared to $30 for 6 feet from Best Buy.

HDTV Quest, Day 9.

Last week I picked up my HD “DVR” from Comcast and will soon have the pleasure of paying $17 more per month on my cable bill (since I’m “adding an outlet” as well).

What would be cool would be the ability to watch anything in High Definition.

It is not the fault of the Comcast DVR, inept as it may be, that prevents me from watching HDTV, it is the lack of a High Def TV…

How to fix?

I spent some time last week looking at TVs at the usual places and figured I could get an oldish model for about $900 plus tax. That was a price I could live with for a starter 32″ HDTV set so I didn’t bother doing too much shopping around. Alas, getting a “cheap” TV was not as easy as originally planned.

It’s like this:

I tried to buy a 32″ Sharp Aquos (model LC-32D41U) from CompUSA last Friday but was denied. After “purchasing” the last one in town on their website and driving 20 miles to pick it up I learned that the store in question mistakenly(?) had their last two units on display instead of just one. At least one of those TVs has been sitting there running every day for a couple of years and was therefore not something I’d want to buy, even if they’d have offered to sell it at a steep discount, which they didn’t.

My credit card wasn’t charged for the $958 since I didn’t take delivery, so that’s nice.

(According to their site right now my local store has “limited quantities” despite it being a discontinued model and unavailable for online ordering. Wonder where that one came from, if it even exists. I think I’ll drop by tomorrow and ask.)

Saturday and Sunday I looked around some more in town and online and found a newer Sharp Aquos at various online stores for less, even after “2-day” shipping. I ordered a Sharp LC-32D42U on Sunday night (Jan. 21) with 2-day shipping. $924 total.

So here we are on Sunday night, seven days later. The TV is finally at the local FedEx sorting facility, where it will sit for a day or two because the ETA says Tuesday.

The TV was ordered on Sunday night with 2-day shipping, and yet the TV wasn’t even shipped until Friday. What gives?

Short version: LCDTVs.com sucks.

Long version:

Order the TV Sunday night, get confirmation in e-mail. Monday: no word. Tuesday, no word. Online account lookup doesn’t work but they’ve got a convenient link to ask for an account reset; because this apparently happens all of the time. Account is reset within minutes but online status says “In Process.”

Somewhere around that time I saw a notice stating that 2-day shipping really means “3-5 business days.” Gee thanks.

So, Wednesday, no word… I ask politely via e-mail address contained in my order confirmation (”customersupport@lcdtvs.com”). It bounces.

I try again with the “sales@lcdtvs.com” e-mail address, and via the website contact form, which says “Please use the form below to contact us, any other form of email will not reach us.” (Gee thanks, again. FYI they do have a toll-free number right there on every page of their site, but why should I have to call them to check on my order after I got an e-mail confirmation?)

Within a couple of hours I get a phone message asking to please call so-and-so at extension such-and-such. I do.

Did I want the LC-32D42U? Yes I did.
Did I need any cables? No, I have cables. (Because I ordered them on Monday and got them in two days.)
Did I need one of the surge protectors that they recommend? No, I have a UPS.
Did I want the $99 extended warranty? No, I didn’t.
OK, we’ll get that right out to you When?
It should ship within 24-48 hours and arrive Monday or Tuesday.

Uh. Thanks.

Way to jump right on that order after three days and then get around to shipping it within a couple of days.

FWIW, I don’t think the phone call was related to the e-mail contact because I got a response to that on Thursday saying that it should ship that day and arrive on Monday.

What they appear to be doing is sitting on the order and then trying to up-sell when they’re contacted by the customer wondering where the hell it is. Or it takes them three days to call and verify an order. Or they need to get the TV shipped to them first and then they ship it out. Or some combination thereof.

Excellent customer service? I think not.

Whatever the case may be the TV was picked up by FedEx Friday (1/26), spent 3 hours in Newark, presumably went through the FedEx hub in Memphis, arrived in Minneapolis Saturday night, with an expected delivery date of Tuesday.

It had better be in pristine condition.

And judging by these comments, it had better be the right TV.

Funny how those user ratings are either scathing 1-Star ratings or glowing 5-Star ratings. I wouldn’t be surprised if the high ratings were shills (in fact, I guarantee that most of them are). The high ratings are short and non-specific, the low ratings are long and detailed. The good ratings also sound very similar… as if written by the same person… hmmm.

If I would have seen those reviews on PriceGrabber I’d have gone elsewhere. I did do a Google search on “lcdtvs.com sucks” and didn’t find anything… but perhaps the next person will.

FWIW, Amazon is listing that TV at $999 but shipping in 4-6 weeks, so they’re out of stock now. One of their alternate sellers has it for $929 + $55 shipping.

I could have avoided all of this mess and picked up a 32″ LG in town for $899 + tax (i.e. $958), or an old model Toshiba for the same price, or a Samsung for an extra $300. A couple of days ago I found the old-old version of this TV (LC-32D40U) at Office Depot, of all places, for $850 with a $200 rebate. Not that I’d want that lame-o 800:1 contrast ratio when I can get 6,000:1 from the newer model, plus whatever else they’ve upgraded over the last 2 generations.

This Sharp Aquos is still pretty low on the totem pole relative to the other models. It doesn’t have a 4 ms refresh and 10,000:1 dynamic contrast, or a four wavelength backlight, but those TVs cost at least 3 times as much. I think I can hold off a while for one of those.

So, hopefully the proper TV is sitting at a FedEx warehouse across town and within a couple of days it will be perched atop my new TV stand. And I can watch any of the several HD shows that are aired each day.