Price Paid:  $5500.00 from Trutone Electronics

Summary:
This unit is a 2002 Sept. model. Trutone is number one. Buy your home theater and TV from a dealer that can give you service down the road when you run into problems. Connecting a system like this is no simple feet. Don’t buy on impulse, take lots of time to research and go many times to various dealers and ask them about the system you are interested in. I took almost a year. Don’t settle on a brand name before you start looking. Ask the dealers when a new model line is coming out; there may be a lot of changes that could change your brand choice. This happened to me; I thought I would by a Sony, wrong! This unit can be taken apart in 2 pieces in less than 10 minutes. You need 2 guys to carry each section and a third to make sure you don’t scratch the walls or tap the screen against a railing or something when taking it down the stairs. I checked out the local big chains (you know their names); they told me it would take 3-4 hours to disassemble and reassemble and cost extra. They use outside people to do this work. The big chains are not always the best price and they definitely do not supply you with good information. Some kid telling you to spend thousands of dollars on a TV and can’t explain much about it, Stop and run! I did find that Best Buy had staff that did know their products. So you found the right dealer; he should include delivery, taking it apart and re-assembly and setting it up. The cables and wires required to connect the TV and home theater system, DVD, VCR will cost alone about $400 (don’t buy cheap cables and speaker wire, middle of the road at minimum). When I turned on my TV the first time my picture was grainy (using an HD cable TV box). Trutone new it was my cable signal. My old TV with digital cable works great. An HDTV in many respects is a computer which requires a clean signal to run beautifully. I needed a cable signal booster and bought the Channel Plus; the cheap ones aren’t strong enough. My system works great. Magic Focus works OK to adjust the set. You should check out “ISF” calibration. In a nutshell, all projection TV’s and all companies, ship the TV with the contrast, brightness and sharpness running at 100%. A qualified technician can adjust these settings down and correctly set the contrast, brightness, sharpness, colour and tint levels. The result is that your TV will run many more years before a gun burns out (1 gun costs about $1,000 to replace), and the screen won’t burn in the black bars when watching in 4:3 format. This costs extra, but you should at least research this before you make a decision. Last but not least an extended warranty from Hitachi, not 3rd party companies. The 3rd party companies have been known to go broke. Hitachi’s is in home service and you can buy 1, 2, 3 or 4 extra years over the 1 year included warranty.

Price Paid:  $5500.00 from Trutone Electronics

Summary:
This unit is a 2002 Sept. model. Trutone is number one. Buy your home theater and TV from a dealer that can give you service down the road when you run into problems. Connecting a system like this is no simple feet. Don’t buy on impulse, take lots of time to research and go many times to various dealers and ask them about the system you are interested in. I took almost a year. Don’t settle on a brand name before you start looking. Ask the dealers when a new model line is coming out; there may be a lot of changes that could change your brand choice. This happened to me; I thought I would by a Sony, wrong! This unit can be taken apart in 2 pieces in less than 10 minutes. You need 2 guys to carry each section and a third to make sure you don’t scratch the walls or tap the screen against a railing or something when taking it down the stairs. I checked out the local big chains (you know their names); they told me it would take 3-4 hours to disassemble and reassemble and cost extra. They use outside people to do this work. The big chains are not always the best price and they definitely do not supply you with good information. Some kid telling you to spend thousands of dollars on a TV and can’t explain much about it, Stop and run! I did find that Best Buy had staff that did know their products. So you found the right dealer; he should include delivery, taking it apart and re-assembly and setting it up. The cables and wires required to connect the TV and home theater system, DVD, VCR will cost alone about $400 (don’t buy cheap cables and speaker wire, middle of the road at minimum). When I turned on my TV the first time my picture was grainy (using an HD cable TV box). Trutone new it was my cable signal. My old TV with digital cable works great. An HDTV in many respects is a computer which requires a clean signal to run beautifully. I needed a cable signal booster and bought the Channel Plus; the cheap ones aren’t strong enough. My system works great. Magic Focus works OK to adjust the set. You should check out “ISF” calibration. In a nutshell, all projection TV’s and all companies, ship the TV with the contrast, brightness and sharpness running at 100%. A qualified technician can adjust these settings down and correctly set the contrast, brightness, sharpness, colour and tint levels. The result is that your TV will run many more years before a gun burns out (1 gun costs about $1,000 to replace), and the screen won’t burn in the black bars when watching in 4:3 format. This costs extra, but you should at least research this before you make a decision. Last but not least an extended warranty from Hitachi, not 3rd party companies. The 3rd party companies have been known to go broke. Hitachi’s is in home service and you can buy 1, 2, 3 or 4 extra years over the 1 year included warranty.