[Jeffhs]

I knew we'd start seeing these older sets for sale after the DTV transition, before DTV converter boxes came on the market. I guess a lot of folks believed that dire warning in 2006, and again in 2009, that "your television will go black after February 17 or June 12" (2009; not sure what the DTV transition date was supposed to have been in 2006). I bet those older TVs have been sitting in basements, garages, etc. all that time, while their owners either went out and bought new flat-panel sets or, in some cases, went without TV. Also, I think a lot of people wanted to get a FP set (regardless of the DTV transition) after seeing the vastly improved picture (compared to 4:3 NTSC TV) on a good set. I realize that on many HDTVs (mainly the cheaper Chinese/Korean off-brands) the pictures are actually worse than the same pictures seen on an NTSC set, but there are some HD FPs that make very good pictures, given a decent signal, such as RCA and Panasonic. I had to stay in our town's senior center for about seven hours (mandatory evacuation) last month after a gas explosion here; they had a Sony console TV in the building for emergency information that looked like either an HDTV or a projection set (I would guess the latter), and it had a decent picture. The convergence looked a bit off, but I was sitting fairly close to the screen at the time; otherwise, however, the picture wasn't half bad.