Do yourself a favor, get your big-screen TV professionally installed

The following is a sponsored review
I’ve had a 36” regular old CRT TV for several years. It was a pretty good one, a Sony® Trinatron&trade, flat in one dimension, standard definition. It served us well – until the tube died. So we headed over to a local home furnishings store and picked out a nice, Toshiba, HD 1080i, 52” DLP TV. I was amazed by its clarity, its light-weight, and its “widescreenedness.”

Where did I go wrong?
Well, first off, I installed it myself. It’s just a TV, how hard could it be? HDMI, Component Video, and Antenna Coax inputs, combined with optical audio out, well, let’s just say I had to learn a lot, fast. The next mistake I made was using my existing TV stand for the new TV.

The surface of the screen is made of a plastic material, rather than glass. That’s both good and bad. Good because finger-prints and other “gooey substances” wipe clean easily; bad because it’s softer than glass, and easier to scratch. One stray toddler with a sharp object can effectively scratch up your brand-new TV in a matter of seconds. Which is exactly what my two-year-old did to mine.

If I had things to do over again I would have opted to go with a professional installer. No, not the teenagers that the store I purchased it from call “professionals,” the actual professionals. You know the type, the ones that do installs all day, every day.

Why?
Well, first off I’d have had the TV wall-mounted. Granted that’s not your typical installation for a DLP TV, but I’d have seen what they could do for me. In the case of a big-screen Plasma or LCD, do yourself a favor, call the professionals. As heartbroken as I was about having a screen scratched up, I can only imagine a 1080p Plasma big-screen yanking the mounting bracket off the wall and your new TV crashing to the floor.

Secondly, let’s face it, even we geeks sometimes have a hard time understanding new technologies, let alone getting them to tie into our existing equipment. Even making sure I had the right cables was difficult since there as so many unknowns.

So, learn from my experience, get a professional TV installation for commercial or residential TVs. I’d recommend HD Installers: Nationwide LCD and Plasma Television Installers. They have locations in Utah (Salt Lake City, West Valley, and Provo/Orem), and others nation-wide.