Well, as I mentioned in a previous post my 8-year-old 4K TCL smart television has been developing faults that are annoying, faint vertical lines that were apparent in some scenes and invisible in others. This past weekend, after several attempts at resetting the set in hopes that would clear up the trouble failed, I bit the bullet and ordered a new set.

Where the old set was an LED, the new one an OLED LG B5 smart TV is a technology that had been outside of comfortable financial resources in 2018. It also has better response times well suited for my casual Xbox gaming of playing Call of Duty on the weekends and getting my butt kicked by teenagers with mutant reaction times.  I ensured that the set also had a setting to display films as films and not as some unnaturally clear, motion-smoothed soap opera.

Thanks to a discount through my employer, Kaiser Permanente, and a spring sale code from LG itself, I managed to knock nearly $200 off the already discounted price. I am not sure, but I may have paid less for this far more capable television than I did for the set that will soon be recycled.

The original shipping date had it arriving this Thursday, May 7th, but that wasn’t going to work for me as I would be at the day job. I rescheduled the delivery for next Thursday, which just happens to be my birthday and part of a long weekend I had planned for celebrating the fact that I will have officially reached Medicare age. So that is when I will take down the old set, set-up the new one, and the next day have a company come out and pick up the discarded television for e-waste disposal and recycling.

OLED has superior black levels and ‘infinite’ contrast, so I will have to decide among my 4K discs, which one will christen the new set.