No bottom in sight.

Right before this year’s Superbowl, that annual orgy of advertising and steroid fueled ‘athletes’, I though it would be pretty smart to buy a nice big screen TV. I have no earthly intention of watching this ridiculous spectacle masquerading as sport, but a ‘Superbowl Special’ is a ‘Superbowl Special’. So I decided to fight my way through a parking lot of drivers with multiple tattoos and monster trucks, and spring for a big screen LCD TV.

I had recently acquired an AppleTV and simply could not make out movie synopses on the old 168 lb. cathode ray tube Sony, so I trotted off to WalMart and blew $900 on a 42″ Vizio. I had been watching the price trends in flat panel TVs and my guess was that prices had pretty much bottomed. As for the brand, I knew that Sony/Samsung made the LCD panel (as they do all these large panels) so had little concern over longevity and quality control. Made in South Korea is a hell of a lot more reassuring than Made in Detroit. Another $30 saw a pair of half decent bookshelf speakers from Radio Shack plugged into my old amplifier, and took care of the truly awful sound produced by the native hardware in the TV.

So I was feeling pretty smart.

Well, I just checked the prices around that annual spell of Genuine American Idiocy known as Black Friday – the biggest retail sale day of the year, coming right after Thanksgiving – and felt pretty foolish. The same TV was now selling for $600 (I think of it as the ‘Subprime Special’) and if you felt spendy, another $100 got you one with a plasma screen rather than an LCD one. Throw in a massive recession and maybe these things will get cheaper yet.

Price trend for a typical Panasonic 42″ LCD TV over
the past nine months. High, median, low.

And we all know the story about CD and DVD players. As an avid classical music fan, I simply had to have a CD player and spent no less than $1,000 on my Hitachi 1000 in 1983. It works to this day and something far better/faster/etc. can be had for …. $50 or less.

Hard disk drives are the worst offenders. My 60gB which came with the MacBook was replaced with a 160, then a 250 and now a 500gB version. Prices? How about $100, $100 and $80, respectively? And that’s all within 18 months. And for mass storage, you can now get 2 terabytes in a properly fan cooled enclosure for under $400. I know as I have 8 terabytes’ worth!

As for flash memory and RAM, who on earth would want to be in those businesses? Every time I use my crappy old Olympus C5050 for a snap for this site, I am reminded that the 256 megabyte CF card it uses ran me over $130, 7 years ago. By contrast, the 2 gB CF card in my 5D now retails for under $25.

Then, take the Canon 5D. An outrageous $3,000 for the body when announced 3 years ago. Now its better/faster/etc. replacement, the 5D Mark II, is expected to retail for $2,600. Meanwhile, lightly used 5Ds sell for $1,300 and falling. I would have bought a used one when acquiring mine a couple of years ago but they were nowhere to be found.

Could I have waited another year for the TV or two years for the camera? Maybe and no. While the TV was a luxury, this avid photographer, well and truly sick of the process/scan/retouch cycle dictated by film, found there was no alternative to the 5D. It’s not that I care for Canon. Frankly, brand means little to me. But I do care for full frame sensors and half decent lenses at reasonable prices. Plus, realizing that used prices of even the best film cameras would come crashing down – because of cameras like the 5D – I decided then and there to unload all that Leica and Rollei gear, making my net investment in my 5D + 7 Canon lenses about as close to zero as you can get. Actually, I made money on the deal. Why anyone would buy near-obsolete film gear beats me, but I trust it made some loony collector happy somewhere.

Frankly, I simply cannot see improving on the quality of the 18″ x 24″ prints from my 5D originals, but two years hence when the 5D Mark II is selling for $1,000 on the lightly used market, thanks to the better/faster/etc. 5D Mark III, I may just snap one up. Anyway, I’ll need another body while Mark I is at Canon to have all the garbage removed from the finder system, thanks to Canon’s non-existent dust sealing in that model. If they will even deign to accept it for overhaul, that is.

Recent 5D selling prices.