The Case For Buying A Shitty TV →
https://marco.org/2013/12/26/the-case-for-buying-a-shitty-tv
Very good points, and the argument applies far beyond just TVs.
While I’ve followed this advice on a lot of “dumb” electronics so far, I don’t think I’d go quite as far as getting a “shitty” TV for one big reason: I hardly ever buy a new TV. In my entire life so far, including every TV my family owned during my childhood, I’ve only had five.
Our current main TV, a 42” 1080p Panasonic plasma, is nearly six years old and is perfectly fine — I don’t intend to replace it until it breaks. We bought a second TV for another room last year, and a pretty great one — a 37” Panasonic 1080p “LED” LCD1 — was only $600. I’ll probably keep it until it breaks, too, which will probably be at least five years away.
Their size makes replacing TVs cumbersome and wasteful, so I don’t want to do it very often, and I think this is a fairly common stance.2 Since good TVs aren’t that expensive and last a very long time by consumer-electronics standards, and replacing TVs is so cumbersome, I don’t think there’s much reason to get shitty ones.