I was visiting friends over the Easter holiday and talk naturally turned to television and hardware devices. The recent Olympics in Vancouver had shown them the beauty of the latest in HDTV and LCD units, and they wanted a high definition unit in a smaller footprint in their family room.The newly available portable LCD TV devices and their wireless network at home offered other choices.

The movie screen dimensions at the most extreme end of the home viewing spectrum do not suit all ages and vision “comfort zones” and abilities. The early hype of gigantic viewing screens has died down to the point where home theater installations are once again flexible to the needs of the customers. Independent decisions about the most preferable device are in vogue again.

I have noticed many such changes lately, people getting smaller TV screens with higher quality and positioning chairs closer. Smaller units for televisions in the home work against prevailing conventional wisdom of earlier decades, when a small television meant a difficult viewing experience necessitated by space or portability requirements. The blind rush to garage-sized LCD screens is over.

Astonishingly, they had planned an installation by a nerd team from a popular electronics store. I was interested in what was so complicated about the TV they had bought that they couldn’t install it themselves.There seemed to be a dyed in the wool belief that anything electronic needed “someone else” to install it. These were educated people, capable of understanding a diagram, brochure or Youtube.

I asked them if they had considered installing the TV themselves, and I was met by a wave of echoed denials. It was too complicated, they weren’t technical enough, they might screw up the mount and the TV might fall due to their own error. I asked if they had even looked at the installation instructions on their new TV or reviewed the reports of other buyers to determine self installation ease of use.

The negative assent surprised me. I showed them the listings for their units and showed them how to Google installation information. What did not surprise me was that at the point of sale no information was traded about the space or audio constraints, and minimal attention paid to multiple speaker options to optimize sound quality.

What seems to me to be happening is that frustrated home theater customers keep buying bigger and larger televisions when what they need is a home audio treatment. My friends had not optimized the room the new television was going into nor had they considered installing wall panels or new speakers. yet they had easily spent enough money to have accorded installation of these items in a competitively priced package.

They had not only not read the fine print on their TV installation package, but neither one of them knew how to use the new remote. To my mind, consideration of handling of the remote and the menu options should have been among the shopping elements when deciding on a new unit. TV home calibration does not usually include programming or automatic tutoring.

Carrying the home theater installation to the logical next step, 3D-ready devices will want much more technical  precision in the home, not less. A lot of specifications in any LCD television review include terms like pulldown display and HDMI inputs, while salespeople highlight terms people do understand like  channel labeling and slim mounting. Innocent customers may not find out until after installation their cable service may not suit the new unit, or that key features are minimized in certain modes.

I recommend that any new television buyer research through the reviews both at the vendor website and online to get “coached” in installing and operating their television. Youtubes have a lot of information in them. They may find a smaller unit like the Sony thirty two inch LCD HDTV suits all their needs, and looking at the ranch-sized screens is a thing of the past.

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