Tech News and Commentary

Dave and the team discuss YouTube's outage, Kanye West's passcode, scanning your feet with your smartphone, Paul Allen's death, Palm's resurrection, and more.

 

Sharon in Atlanta listens on AM920 The Answer and asked: "I know this sounds simple to most people, but I've had traumatizing situation the last few years and had to have my big screen televisions stored. Just wanted to know whether or not, other than some features being obsolete on my "never used" television sets, will they be worth continuing to connect and use or would I have to purchase a slew of new big screen panel television sets? I would hate for them to go to waste. Love you much and appreciate your show."

 

Sharon, there’s no reason why your TVs shouldn’t be perfectly good to use. There was a switchover to all digital transmission a few years back, but if these TVs are relatively new that shouldn’t be an issue.

Even if it was, you could buy converter boxes for them so they could still get digital programming.

If they’re not smart TVs, you may miss out on some potential streaming choices, but even that’s not a reason to get rid of them since streaming sticks and set top boxes are pretty inexpensive these days, and they’re all you need to make any TV smart.

If you do want to replace them you’ll find that the price of televisions has plummeted, big screen and thin and light are the bare minimum that every base model meets these days, you’ll pay extra for features like 4K and HDR, but if you don’t care about those you can easily get a decent big screen TV for as low as a couple hundred dollars.

That’s not to say you need to. Like we said before, your old sets will likely work just fine unless they’ve been damaged by the elements. Heat, humidity, extreme cold, those are all enemies of electronics, but if they’ve been safe from those, odds are they’re functional and ready to continue serving you well whenever you take them out of storage.

 

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