A decadesworth of consumer technology.

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Link: https://actionable.wordpress.com/2016/01/20/a-decadesworth-of-consumer-technology/

From Actionable's Blog

television

1991

i did not keep a television for the twelve years i spent living alone, preferring books and music to the ghastly and limited broadcast offerings of the 1990s.

2003

When we first started living together, my wife-to-be produced her elderly SONY Trinitron television, a cubic-metre of black plastic shrouding a buzzy, hot, squealing cathode-ray tube with its fuzzy, staticky, swollen, heavy, greyish, screen.

2006

In the relatively-wealthy period we enjoyed before having children, we splashed out on a beautiful, if modestly-sized, top-of-the-range high-definition SONY Bravia flat-screen LCD television, cast the old cathode-ray unit into the ocean, and marvelled at the details and the colours of our new television.

2015

The SONY Bravia television had held up well, despite my young daughter scratching its screen by driving and scouring a plastic-toy DottyWot1 across its surface, and despite her malevolent cousin smashing its remote-control unit with a hammer.  However, just before Christmas, the picture started turning pink and blue and becoming frustratingly-unwatchable a greater proportion of the time than not.  We held out for a few weeks.

2016

A replacement television had become necessary, so we bought another SONY Bravia, this one with built-in wi-fi and a big red “NETFLIX” button in the centre of its remote control.  This new television:

  • was much cheaper
  • has a bigger screen
  • has higher resolution
  • is smarter
  • weighs less than half
  • consumes less than half the power

…than the old television, and it has been embraced as a wonderful thing by the whole family.  The characteristics of the two machines are:

Specification Old Television New Television
Model Number KLV-V26A10 KDL-32W700C
Date Manufactured JAN 2005 OCT 2015
Date Purchased JUL 2006 JAN 2016
Price Paid NZD$3,150 NZD$747
Screen Size 26″ 30″
Weight 17.6kg 6.8kg
Wireless Connectivity none 802.11a/b/g/n
HDMI Inputs 1 4
Power Consumption 145W 62W
Screen Resolution 1366×768 1920×1080
Made In Japan Malaysia

What strikes me heavily is the size and nature of the difference a decadesworth of progress in consumer technology has made, and this is a very-mainstream and very-pedestrian example of that progress — there is an unimaginably-vast quantity more to come.

 

Notes:

  1. DottyWot is a character from “The WotWots”, a children’s television programme made in New Zealand: https://www.wotwots.com/

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