Pnambic

So, I was at Best Buy burning some time last night and checking things out. Looking to get that LG 40" 1080P for $150 on Black Friday (or earlier if they drop the price earlier). And I noticed something that I thought I'd share with you all as I don't recall if this has been discussed here yet. In looking at the TV, which is 1080P, next to a similar sized 4K set, there was a really noticeable different in the picture quality, even from 8 to 10 feet away. I thought to myself, this is contrary to physics, what's going on here? So I looked at the back of the TV's and want to know what I found? I found they were feeding the 1080P sets with coax and they were feeding the 4K sets with HDMI. Digging a little further, I found the 1080P set's weren't even being given an HD signal - they're getting an SD signal and the TV's are upscaling. That's how they're selling 4K TV's - they're setting them next to each other, sending the 1080P an inferior signal and then saying, "look how much better the 4K set looks!". Dirty. I asked the rep about it and he sheepishly smirked and shrugged. Said it wasn't his call. I asked if they had any thumbdrives with 1080P material to watch on the 1080P set and he said one of the other guys did, but he wasn't there yesterday. SO. Put your own test material on your own thumbdrive and take it with you if you want to really compare apples to apples. Retailers have a significant interest in fooling you and they will if they can. Now I see why so many people are falling for the hype.

Wow, enoreeman, why don't you tell us what you really think! You're sounding almost as jaded as I am with 4K...HAHAHA And Len, Apple products are generally also a pain in the you-know-what to work on...

Sweet!

Here we go again... I believe my friend Riven here has done a ton of work looking into these TV's for the charts and I totally appreciate all that hard work. But the really astute observer might have noticed that many of Walmart's ads specifically say that models or even brands may vary by store and most don't include specific model numbers. This is because they often substitute on Black Friday as the logistics of getting all of their quintillions of stores to carry enough of these TV's in stock is really hard. So they fudge it sometimes with similar items. This guess looks like it may be right, but I've seen times (like last year) where there were multiple Element TVs that technically fit the description in the ad, but had differing specs. So with Walmart, you should take their ads with a grain of salt or expect the worst and be happily surprised if you get something better. Philips doesn't have any information on this product on their website. That's a red flag for me By the way, the refresh rate is 60 Hz. Says so several times on the Walmart product page anyway. "Perfect Motion Rate" is marketing mumbo jumbo. It doesn't say that it supports HDR or WCG, which is really the only reason to buy a 4K TV. If you buy a 4K TV without that, it's like buying a 1080P TV that's only in black and white. Sure, technically you're getting all those pixels, but you're not getting all the beautiful depth of color that really makes UHD worthwhile. Thanks Riven!

As someone who deals with this kind of data publication all the time, it's just a more foolproof plan to have everything in place except the stock level and then just update that at go-live time. That way you know all the other dozens of pieces of data that are required for the item to show up in the right places are all where they need to be and functional. It's a good way to handle the situation.

I got my first good radio controlled car from the Shack back when I was 10 or 12. Good memories.

How well are you insured? Home/Renters as well as Health? Ravenseye chimed in with some good professional experience here: http://forums.gottadeal.com/topic/267813-anyone-buying-a-hoover-board-this-year/?do=findComment&comment=1334064 In the end, it depends. How coordinated is your 13 yr old? Some will take to it like a fish to water. Others will fall on their face over and over. Regardless, make sure to have the video camera ready as those videos are a hit on YouTube and could help offset possible medical expenses.

Hard to say. Walmart doesn't do a good job of clearly identifying the products in their ads so we're left guessing. We don't know the model number to look up the specifics, so we have no idea: - if it supports any HDR material (probably not) - if it supports wide color gamut (probably not) - if it has built-in wireless or requires a dongle or wired connection - if it has 60 or 120 Hz refresh rate (probably 60 Hz) - how many HDMI ports it has (probably 2, maybe 3) - if it has a USB port (good to power streaming dongles and to stream media from) - if it has a VGA port (good if you want to hook up a computer to it) - if it has an optical out (good for sound bars) All we know is it's a Philips, it has a 54.6" screen, its LED, has some level of smart features, can display 4K content (of which there really isn't much, so this is a worthless option in my eyes), is only available at Walmart and will be on sale for $298. With all the unknowns, it's hard to have an educated opinion on it. Sorry.

Brutal

Hey Dee!!!!! Newegg just added a new version of the laptop I linked to above with the 2.5 GHz version of the i5 (i5-7200U)! http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16834315713 They must have been reading your post! Just $10 more.

Wow...yet another example where simple-minded corporate bureaucracy gets in the way of real performance. Sorry Dee. In all real world examples, the ACER linked to above should be noticeably faster than the HP. But that doesn't matter if it costs you your job, does it? By the way, in looking it up, I found that while the base speed of the i5-6200U (in the ACER) is 2.3 GHz, it has a turbo speed of up to 2.8GHz. Which means when the system senses it needs more oomph, and the system temperature is within tolerance, it will bump up the performance to 2.8 GHz as necessary.

Yea, but don't get caught up on MHz or GHz of processors so much. It's not as straight forward as it used to be back in the Pentium days. Today, we're talking about multiple cores, and each core has multiple threads, extended instruction sets and "turbo" speeds. Why do you think you need 2.4 GHz? By all reports, the i5 6200U is a fine processor that should be able to handle just about anything 99% of computer users can throw at it. BTW, the BestBuy laptop is a fine laptop, but it has far too little RAM in my opinion. As Len mentioned, half your RAM (at least) will be tied up by your Windows operating system right off the top leaving you with just 2GB left to share for everything else, including putting all the pixels on your screen. The one I linked to has a dedicated video card with 2GB that ONLY used for video and 8GB for everything else (2GB for Windows and 6 for everything else). I would be absolutely shocked if the HP laptop at BestBuy was faster than the ACER from Newegg in pretty much any situation. The Newegg one also has faster wireless networking capability (AC) and Bluetooth 4.1 where the HP doesn't. I see mixed reports on whether the HP's RAM can be upgraded (BestBuy's Q&A says no, but a different site says yes) and HP's website doesn't list the device, so it's hard to be sure. But that also is a red flag for me - if I can't find the device on the manufacturer's own website, I find a different option. Edit: Also, the larger screen of the HP actually has a lot less pixels. The ACER has full HD 1920 x 1080 while the HP has 1600 x 900. That means the ACER has almost one and a half times as many pixels. And the battery is reported to be up to 8 hours on the ACER vs. 6 hours on the HP. And lastly, the ACER has the capability to incorporate an SSD in addition to the HDD, which could significantly speed things up if you wanted.

Yea, you're not getting a "gaming laptop" for under $400. You're not getting a legitimate "gaming laptop" for less than a grand, but there are plenty of laptops that can play minecraft under that. Newegg has the closest I've seen with that Acer on page three of their ad (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?item=N82E16834315712) for $420. But if I'm going to game on that, I'm probably going to need to add a better (faster) hard drive and probably more RAM. So we're still talking $500+ probably. You mention upgrading the graphics card down the line and you're not going to be doing that in any cost effective manner with a laptop. Places like Microcenter, Tiger Direct and Newegg often sell great kits to build your own computer and you can pick and choose a lot of the components to fit your performance needs and budget. Last gaming desktop I built was a little over a year ago. Spent about $600 on everything including case, motherboard, processor, cooler, 3GB video card, 16GB RAM, 1TB HDD, DVD drive, Wireless AC, 750 watt PSU, couple extra case fans, and other little odds and ends. The kids love it and report it can easily handle all of their gaming requirements still.

Start here: http://forums.gottadeal.com/topic/266563-official-black-friday-laptops-discussion-thread/?do=findComment&comment=1334501 Facebook has a LOT of crap on it. if you spend any time at all on it, you need to be regularly cleaning your machine. Tell us about your current laptop - what processor, how much RAM, Make/Model, screen size? If all you're doing is facebook and Internet browsing, then I imagine any laptop in just about any one of the ads would be sufficient. In fact, your current laptop would likely be perfectly sufficient as well if it were cleaned up a bit. However, if you're set on a new laptop, I would chase the Acer Aspire E 15 E5-575G-52RJ at NewEgg. It has an i5, 8GB (DDR4), 2GB of GDDR5 on a discrete NVIDIA video card and a 1920 x 1080 screen. All at $420. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834315422 Honestly, if you go with less, you're likely to be in the same spot you're at now in a year or two. Unless you learn to clean your laptop. We need to start with the minimum requirements for the software your daughter wants to use to record and edit the videos. Report back and we'll help to steer you in the right direction. Generally speaking though, video crunching is really resource intensive, so laptops that do it well aren't cheap. There are LOADS of good laptops this year that can do this, but none of them are the $199 door busters. This looks like the best bang for the buck around your $400 budget. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834315422 ($420)

Maybe the Nintendo Switch price was leaked? http://www.ign.com/articles/2016/11/14/nintendo-switch-price-may-have-been-accidentally-revealed

B&H FTW!!!

http://www.cheatsheet.com/gear-style/gadgets/4k-tvs-under-500-are-they-worth-it.html/ A good short read.

I haven't laid eyes on this myself, but in researching it, I found some things that concern me. - Fair amount of complaints of judder and motion blur - HDR Pro supposedly means HDR10 support, but not Dolby Vision, though LG has been less than clear on this. Some report that "HDR Super" is LG's designation for TV's that support HDR10 and Dolby Vision. - I don't see anything mentioning wide color gamut. - I found a post that seemed to indicate that this screen uses LG's RGBW screen technology, which may actually downgrade the horizontal pixel count from 3840 to 2880. - I haven't been able to locate anything on LG's website that details the real refresh rate of media at specific resolutions. This generally means it's 60Hz. - I can't find any real reviews on it. So, while 70 inches is FREAKING HUGE, and $1000 for a 70 inch 4K TV sounds absolutely awesome, I would worry that 1080P material might look worse on this set than it would on a good quality less-than-$1000 70 inch 1080P set. (Do they even make those anymore?) Interestingly, as 2880 is a multiple of 720, 720P material might actually look better on this set than most others as the scaling would potentially be a lot cleaner. I think it's important to remember that this is still very new technology and the newest technology is never the best example of it. If you buy a 4K TV now, there's a really good chance that the 4K TVs next year will blow this year's models out of the water. Man, HDTV marketing material just really ticks me off. I don't know how they're getting away with a lot of this without being sued for misrepresentation. There are industry standards. Simply list them by their standardized name and put check boxes next to them to indicate the set supports them. It's really not that hard. It's like Chevy advertising that their new Suburban gets 48 MPG(a)! And you have to spend two hours scouring their website to find no definition of what exactly the (a) stands for. Email the company questions and not get answers. Leave messages that don't get returned. And then 6 moths to a year later, some other resource takes a truck and does some real world testing on it to determine that the (a) is a calculation that artificially increases the real MPG reported on the dash display by simply multiplying it by 4. Real MPG is still just 12. * for the record, Chevy makes no such claims - I made that all up to make a point

Just a quick head's up, looking at a lot of these deals on the store websites and quite a few are already active or within $10 or $20 of the advertised sale prices.

yep Best deal I've seen so far on a real gaming laptop is the Alienware one from Dell Home for 1299.99. It has a legit 6GB NVIDIA discrete video card, an i7, comes with 8GB high speed ram, but is upgradeable to 32GB and a larger than average battery to boot to keep all those electrons flowing. About the only other things I'd look for would be a secondary SSD drive

Well, at least I feel loved. From a parent of 4 sons, at least in so far as homework is concerned, mobility is not a desirable trait for a workstation. A dedicated workspace with a largish monitor (or two) and room for a notebook/reference book, not in view of any TV, is far better. We repurposed our formal dining room as a schoolwork room with two computer desks and the dining room table pushed up against the wall. Three separate workstations in there. Formal dinners were never high on our priority list anyway. However, I do recognize that many homeschool programs have weekly gatherings with other homeschooled kids where a laptop might prove beneficial depending on the material. But I still wouldn't make my kid use the cramped workspace of a laptop interface for ALL of their work. Smaller is better for some situations, but not all if them. Now, as a college student? Laptops rock. In the workplace? I would die without my laptop. But I like to at least pretend that I'm more mature than my teenage and pre-teen sons and can effectively use the laptop without suffering from too many....squirrel!

Wow! Flip phones!

My prayers are with you as well. My first concern, as mcwalker mentioned, is how your daughter will handle the stress. Maybe the people around you waiting to get in are great and understanding, and the weather is pleasant, and everything goes perfectly smoothly. Your daughter and her service dog would likely be just fine. But maybe the weather turns nasty, and people get cold and uncomfortable, and they start getting snippy with everyone around them, and things get ugly. Maybe there are arguments and cursing, or worse. How would this affect your daughter? Would it cause another seizure? What if her dog gets stepped on accidentally (or God forbid on purpose), would the stress trigger a seizure? I honestly don't know much about seizures, so I'm not suggesting anything, just asking questions. My job is to identify fail points and keep them from happening with data, so I tend to be the kind of person who prepares for the worst in most things. You know your daughter better than anyone I imagine. You probably know what she can handle and what she can't. Contact those stores in advance and see if maybe you can't work something out. I've known store managers who would come up with a creative solutions (such as maybe letting you in a back door with some stash set aside for you) for challenging situations and I've known many who would just turn a blind eye. You don't know til you ask. Good luck! And I echo "family first".

Well... - that's a really low end processor. It's a Pentium, not a Core - the memory is about as slow as you can find - the screen resolution is about as low as you can find - the graphics are the lowest I've seen this season - I can't find specifics on the battery other than it's 3-cell But it does apparently support wireless ac, has a read/write DVD tray and is reportedly touch screen. But anytime I can't type in the product's model number on the manufacturer's website and go to a page that tells me more about it, I walk away. And this is one of those times. There is one in the BJ's ad that looks the same, but has a Core i3 processor and graphics a generation newer for $50 less, but no touch screen. There is another in the Dell Home add with a Core i3, better graphics, 4-cell battery and still a touch screen for $50 less as well. So no, I wouldn't really say this was a good deal. Sorry. This is probably good enough for browsing most of the web and doing email, but if you ever use any other more modern laptop or multitask very often, this one's slowness might drive you crazy.

Yeah, you'd think with a company where COST is in their name, they might include the COST of the product in their ad...