Why no more small screen FP Sets?
 

My wife was looking for a replacement for her Toshiba 15" flat screen TV which has always had bad reception and was more a source of frustration than anything. She uses it in the bedroom so was wanting to replace with a 15" or even a 10" set. All I could find were 19" on up or 7" portables none of which appear to be of any quality. I ended up getting an Insignia 19" set for $99 which seems to work well and seems reasonably well built despite that fact that it is all plastic. What I wonder is why there are no more small sets that are just right for kitchen or bedroom use. Years ago the 10, 12 and 13 inch sets were perfect for these applications. I figure it must be either of a couple of reasons. One, the trend toward insanely large sets means no one wants anything below 24 inches anymore. Two, small screen viewing has migrated to laptops, tablets and smartphones. Has the market died out for compact tabletop TVs?

I think you probably hit the nail on the head. I remember when a 25" TV was a big set; but, now, if you tell someone you have a 25" TV, they ask how you can watch such a small set.

Even with our 46" plasma set, I still consider 25" to be big screen. Even my 21" Zenith roundie looks big to me. Of course, when I was a kid in the Seventies, big screen was anything 19 inches or larger. I know screen size was for a long time limited by the practical dimensions of a CRT. Today with LCDs there are few limitations on possible screen size and it shows with sets I have recently seen in stores above 70 inches.

The smaller panels are made for laptops and tablets so IMHO they probably only make the smaller screen sets when there happen to be more panels laying around than the computer makers can use.

I use my 13" MacBook Pro with a USB TV tuner as a portable TV and it works great, better in fact than any of the current portable digital sets around. Technology has come a long way.

I generally use my laptop too, have an eyeTV tuner.

But I do have a portable DTV. It's hard to get good reception on it with a single pole antenna though.. At least it's an f-type and can be replaced.

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CVS has a 15" Craig set. Looks fine for a hundred bucks or so. Full inputs, reasonably high resolution. Viewing angle is very narrow, however.

Note that many smaller "portable" TVs, 7" and 9" versions, have a vertical resolution of only 234 lines (!), which I classify as truly HD: Horrible Definition. Text graphics and decoded captions are compromised.

Chip

The eyeTV tuner is what I use. Reception is excellent with a 6 inch monopole aerial.

I think that once sets of a given size get "too cheap", they stop making them, the same as hard disk drives and USB memory modules. Your 19-inch set for $100 is a good example-they are not going to bother offering 15-inch sets for $79, I suspect. (I did find one for $69 at Fry's a while back though, and I had to try a $69 HDTV, so now I keep it in the bedroom for occasional use.)

For what it is worth, all of the 19-inch LCD sets I have seen have had much better off-angle viewing than any of the 15-inch sets that were on the market at the same time, especially from above or below the screen level.

You could always pick up a 15" LCD computer monitor off craigslist for about $15 and use a VGA tuner (they can be found for about $35).

One might end up with a much better and more serviceable small screen TV that way.

Small sets suffer from profit margin. Regardless of size they still need all the innards that a large screen needs. The under-the-hood cost is similar other than power for a larger screen but the margin is down to nill.

I bought a Target Element 19" a week ago for $99. It could be the worst flat ever made. It would not scan HD channels and the analog input gave the worst resolution and color I have ever seen. Gone and I hope Target chokes on the returns.