Which one, HDTV Ready or HDTV Builtin?

[BasicBlak]

I feel for all of the people who paid $300-$500 more for sets w/tuners in 2004 and early 2005. Almost every company marked those models up to take advantage of offering that feature (i.e. they were ripping everyone off). But when then government mandated tuners on the larger sets and everyone had to include one in their basic sets, beginning in July of this year, the price for the tuner went to 0. This is exactly what government analysts predicted when companies loudly complained a couple of years ago when the tuner mandate was issued.

The only way that a tunerless model should be lower in price is if they are closing out the last 2005 models and are clearance pricing those. This is true for Mitsubishi too. Their new 2006 52" DLP sets with tuners are lower priced than their 2005 models were this spring without tuners. This is true across the industry.

I recently picked up my HDTV w/o tuner for a great price as CC had them on clearance. They dropped the price $400 less than what they had been selling it for in order to clear them out of their warehouse. Good deal for me! I'm using an 811 as my tuner and it pulls in all of my local digital channels. Hopefully next year Dish will release a new DVR w/mpeg4 and I'll go to that.

I guess at the end of the day, what really matters is that everyone is satisfied with their purchases regardless of what they paid for it. (I know I am!) People buy certain models for an assortment of reasons, price being only one of many considerations. Could one possibly overpay for a television? Of course, as with anything. But that's the nature of this beast...there are so many things to buy out there to hook up to our widescreen toy that it's always possible to make up the savings somewhere else.

On another note, I, too, am looking forward to Dish's MPEG4 DVR next year. The 811 is certainly serviceable in the interim, but it took the purchase of my Tosh for me to realize the 811's OTA shortcomings.