Q. I am fed up with efforts by manufacturers to make my gear obsolescent. A year and a half ago I bought an expensive plasma TV, HD satellite service, Blu-ray player and surround sound. Now they have 3-D and my system is out of date already. It seems like it never ends and I am fed up.
--J.S., Madison, Wis.
A. A quick look at my e-mail inbox shows that your sentiment is shared by a lot of readers. Just when they felt it was safe to jump into the high-definition television waters, surprise! Now 3-D HDTV is the hot new thing. I receive similar e-mails from readers who purchased expensive digital cameras, lamenting that newer models are better and sometimes less expensive, too. Home theater receivers add new features every year. Some new features may look great and some may look superfluous, but ultimately that one-year-old receiver doesn't look so fantastic when the new models are introduced.
Though it may seem that the manufacturers are trying to force you to but new things by making your old gear obsolete, I have been around the industry long enough to know it isn't the case. Any industry or any manufacturer willing to sit on its laurels will soon end up in the trash heap. Besides the competitive and business case for innovation, it's in human nature to innovate and want something better than what you have now. That's what took us from black & white TV to color TV to HDTV, from VCRs to DVRs, from VHS to Blu-ray, from film to digital memory cards, from dial-up Internet to high-speed Internet.
Would you really want to go back to the previous technology in each of these examples? I doubt it. I have shot a lot of photographic film in my life and sometimes I feel nostalgic for the film experience and consider buying a new film camera. Then I think of drawbacks such as the cost of the film, the expense of processing, the inability to review pictures immediately after I take them, the storing of prints and negatives, and no instant gratification e-mailing them to friends and family. After briefly considering the limitations of the old technology I am grateful for the efforts that have made digital photography as good as it is today.
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Don't let new innovations spoil your enjoyment of what you have now. Though there may be something new out there, your system will do exactly what it was promised to do when you purchased it, which is to provide high-definition entertainment with surround sound. The 10 megapixel digital SLR purchased two years ago still takes beautiful pictures, even though the current model may have 14 megapixels. And so on.
The silver lining in all of this is groundbreaking new technology frequently takes a significant amount of time to be ubiquitous and widely affordable. Though 3-D is out now there isn't much to watch and the TVs do cost more than comparable conventional models. By the time your TV or Blu-ray player needs replacing or you are simply ready for a new one, you will likely find that 3-D is the rule rather than the exception, the price is affordable, and there is lots to watch. This is exactly what happened in the transition from standard definition to HDTV.
