Once upon a time, $6,000 was the price of a fleet of used Honda Accords. It was the price of a first class air flight to Rome, and it was the price of a week in Mazatlan with childcare for your kids thrown in. But today’s changing (and constricting) safe travel avenues and the hybrid development and expansion of home theater equipment means a $6,000 Samsung LCD TV may be worth its weight in gold.

The Samsung LN65B650 is sixty five inches of streaming madness. The box alone sitting on the curb will halt traffic for at least a week. This big boy will take out your back wall and make the neighbors really, really wish they had let you borrow that cup of sugar back in 1998. Every dollar video you rent from now until kingdom come will now look like a million bucks.

A giant LCD like this Samsung can earn its money back in one year of plausible metrics. the average family of four spends $2,500 on entertainment and/or amusement outing meals out every annual quarter. but what if the dollars went into a fine LCD unit and the Wii and other games went on at home? That’s about $208 a week the home unit might shave off the credit cards while you keep possession instead of a valuable home asset.

The size of this 65-inch screen means no guest crowd is too large to see the game, the moment, or the candlestick in the study with Professor Plum. Parental controls are easier with parents in the room and a visual footprint that can be seen from Mars. Preloaded content and shows can keep the choices family friendly, age appropriate and commercial free. That’s worth the price of admission right there for some families.

An LCD unit like the Samsung changes the game of the whole house. Every critical email becomes readable without the hunt for the glasses. Getting the kids to watch that nature documentary is easier when there’s a South African veld the size of a Tanzanian savannah measuring wall to wall. Performance technology is kind of the occipital lobes of all ages. Audio can beat through the floor or drift from the best of the latest headphone technology.

Most homes have a plus one or bonus room. But midcentury home dwellers deal with scarcity of space and even scarcer electrical hookups available. hauling the laptop around, fudging the wireless network through walls and cellphones fanning throughout the house, and the intermittent problem of environmental noise just as the kids have dropped off to sleep can wear on the nerves.

But with a future-friendly unit like the 65 inch Samsung lurking in the family room, it’s never too much trouble to boot up the computer and get some work done. Those YouTubes you enjoy are free, and can keep the family laughing for a trifling fraction of what movies and popcorn cost for the entire family at the theater. Consider also saving gas, parking, time traveling and random events like obnoxious fellow movie watchers, and movies at home sound like Paradise.

Last Thanksgiving, the Sony LCD my parents bought was showing the Alfred Hitchcock classic “to Catch a Thief’. The remastered version was amazing and our whole family was drawn in. The problem? A TV meant to suitably entertain two seniors was hardly the right size for a group of thirty people. We crowded closer and closer around the loveseat and easy chair, watching the grand masquerade ball and Cary Grant and Grace Kelly.

With a 65 inch TV, we might all have all see the action from across the room. A family memory might have been more cozy. And I know my mother’s charity friends and their luncheons for between thirty and forty women could benefit from a video presentation of some sort. And for long distance family telephone calls, the internet is simply the best thing that ever happened to close family living far apart.

Insofar as a new LCD TV can supplement home telephony, extend your PC, introduce family size Skype calls to family gatherings across the nation, allow educational viewing and cultural enrichment on a scale that rewards the effort, saves gas and parking dilemmas on movie night, and plays the big game, $6,000 starts to look like a bargain.