The Quest for Television
Buying a TV in China
There are certain items which are essential to civilization. Fire, agriculture, writing, and TV 
all qualify.
Last week, my lovely wife and I were sitting down to watch another episode of Elementary. While getting the DVD player loaded, I kept hearing a momentary buzzing sound that I couldn’t quite identify. Once I settled back onto the couch, I noticed that this noise was accompanied by the image on the TV flickering and temporarily shrinking. After about 60 seconds, there was a long buzzing sound accompanied by the picture destabilizing. Then the TV powered down by itself. 
Emergency resuscitation efforts were employed. 
All failed. 
The old TV – May it rest in piece
My first thought: Well, this sucks. 
My second thought: I wonder what a new TV costs. 
Although some of my personal tech is fairly advanced, I’ve never owned a flat screen TV. The house I’m living in came equipped with 2 older HD TVs that still use picture tubes. The one that failed was the larger of the two. My landlord is a great guy, but would be far more likely to suggest spending a large amount of time trying to get the old TV repaired. After some discussion, my wife and I decided to go find ourselves a new TV.
One of the best concentrations of shops to do this is in DongCheng. In a very small area, there’s WalMart, Carrefour, Fashion, and Gome.
We started at Walmart. I saw an OK looking 42″ (Although China is metric, TVs are still done in inches). The sales girl talked to my wife and it turns out that even Walmart has wiggle room on prices. However, the girl wanted to show us a 48″ smart TV. Both were made by Konka.
My first thought: OK, I’ve heard of smart phones, but somehow I missed out on smart TVs. 
My second thought: I wonder just how incredibly expensive a smart TV is.
I found out that smart TVs are similar to smart phones, in that they can connect to the internet and have some apps installed. Konka uses an Android OS (some other brands use a variety of other operating systems). This sort of also partly solves the TV vs. internet dilemma, since a smart TV can access online programming. It turned out to be less insanely expensive than I thought. Again, the marked price was higher than what the sales girl quoted. She showed us how to access the menu which gave all the specifications.
Overall, I was impressed, but wanted to see what else was out there. We headed over to Gome. The sales guy there seemed to think that 48″ was the minimum size we were looking for and kept showing us some very big (and very expensive) TVs until my wife got him back on track. None of the comparable ones matched the offer at WalMart.
Next up was Fashion. Although 65″ curved TVs are very impressive, those were also far outside of the planned budget (which was firmly enforced by the amount of cash in my pocket).
Next, we ended up at Carrefour. They had a very good offer on a 50″ smart TV. It was 1000 RMB less than the shelf price. It was also a Konka, but had some better electronics on the backend. On the other hand, even with 1000 off, it was 700 RMB more expensive than the 48″ one at WalMart. We decided to head back across the street to Walmart with the intent of getting the 48″ TV.
As it turned out, all the sales people in electronics head off to dinner at the same time and we just missed them. 
While we were waiting, we started looking at some of the other TVs.
My lovely wife checking out a TV
So far, all the screens of our candidates were 1920 x 1080 (the same as my laptop). While playing with the remote on a much more expensive 49″ Konka, I found it was 3840 x 2160. It also had more RAM. My wife showed me where the language selection button was. I wonder if any of the people in the electronics department read enough English to figure out how to set the floor model of that TV back to Chinese.
Finally, my lovely wife decided to hunt down someone. Our sales girl was nowhere to be found, so she grabbed the nearest clerk, who confessed that our girl had gone home after dinner. He also was unaware of the discount off the list price of the 48″ model, but did point out a 1000 RMB discount on one of the two 49″ models we were looking at. After some lengthy discussions, the sales girl was called at home. Further phone arguments negotiations got another 100 RMB off the price. This made the 49″ model almost exactly the same price as the 50″ one at Carrefour. The higher resolution was more than enough to tip the balance, so we bought it.
The WalMart we were shopping in was previously a Trust-Mart (and gets several mentions in the My Big Fat Guangdong Wedding story). WalMart bought the Trust-Mart chain sometime back and rebranded all of the stores to WalMart a few years ago. Strangely enough, the receipt we were issued to give to the delivery guy was printed on an old Trust-Mart form.
Trust-Mart – the name still lingers
I’m surprised that there were enough of the old Trust-Mart forms printed to still be in use.
Saturday morning, it was delivered. There was one problem. The old TV was more than impressively heavy. So heavy that I didn’t think the helpful delivery guy and I could safely carry it down to the first floor. Instead, we ended up setting it on a folded up cardboard box and managed to barely control the slide down the stairs just enough to prevent any damage to us, the TV, or the stairwell.
Next up was trying to figure out the features of the new TV. I wanted to test the ability to play files off the USB connections. Sadly, those were not available on the inputs menu. I was about 3 mouse clicks away from getting go the English version of the instruction manual off of Konka’s website in Hong Kong when my lovely wife pointed out the USB button on the remote. 
Our shiny new TV
Since the short instruction sheet we had was all in Chinese, she got the privilege of setting up the internet connection. I’m rather impressed by the number of channels and shows available.
Finally, the speakers on it aren’t very loud. The existing speakers in the entertainment center died before we took over the second floor and resisted my attempts to revive them (power came up, a pretty display showed the sound as it happened, but no signal ever got forwarded to the actual speakers). We ended up swiping the external speaker system from the other TV on the 3rd floor and hooked them up. Problem solved. 
Compared to some of my other home appliance purchasing adventures in China, buying a TV wasn’t too bad. 
Now all I have to do is remember to NOT look at TV prices for the next year or two. If I do, I’m sure I’ll see something much bigger and better for a lot less money.
