James Mok’s Soliloquy

In the mids of mingling with newer FB friends, I have decided that I have had enough of the house with its parts slowing disintegrating into ashes.

Amongst other not so immediately needed items, my room and bathroom lights need to be changed as the heat of old fashion light bulbs had melted their sockets and wirings off of them and somehow much earlier attempts to have them replaced with neon bulbs had not been successful. In one case, the neon bulb even exploded with its parts intact, fortunately. If memory serves, these are 13 year old 16″ 3 bulb ceiling lights cost about HKD$180 a piece at the time. Today, one can only by 12″ 2 bulb ones at near that price with the majority of them being around $260. I chose 2 higher quality 16″ 3 bulbs ones with much bigger vents and this time around, all the shops says you could use regular bulbs but neon bulb with a much lower power consumption at equivalent brightness is highly recommended. OK, so that means an extra $20 per bulb is added the price as they were to be so nice that they would make that trade for the bulbs that came with the lights discounted price. Frankly, I think it is absurd to charge 5 times as much for a neon bulb over regular bulbs nowadays after being in the market for over 15 years. As it turned out, one of the lights was out of stock, so they could not deliver them at the time they had promised so I got to choose another one in which I chose one that would have cost me another 100 dollar more had I bought it at the same time and now, the shop would not charge me extra and on top of that, they had thrown in another set of 3 neon bulbs for me for free! That is certainly nice of them….. well, perhaps the original special discounted price we had negotiated before was not “special enough” then? At any rate, I got one nicer light and 3 free neon bulbs.

I then bought two stainless steal railed quartz lights for $45 each from the same shop, quartz bulb included. When I inquired about replacing the quartz bulbs with LED bulbs that I saw at PLC, a local renowned lighting company, that they had a very bright single LED bulb installed with the in-ceiling mount that costs $480 each, the shop said the could replace the quartz bulb in the rail light with a much dimmer 20 LED bulb for “a mere” $60, power adapter replacement included. I declined their offer and simply bought them with the regular quartz bulbs.

I went to Ap Liu Street, the well know local gadget galore selling street, during lunch and found those LED replacement bulbs for quartz bulbs. $20 each for the 12 LED ones, $80 each for single 3W LED ones, $138 for 3 3W LED ones. Still expensive for a bulb but guess what… they are direct replacement bulbs for quartz bulbs! In fact, there is no such LED bulbs the would require any replacement of power adapters if in fact they are being use as quartz bulb replacements. Happy, and I bought an assortment of them. Why? mW, less than 3W, and less than 9W of power consumption as opposed to 5W, 25W and 50W respectively for quartz. Hey, I don’t think I am getting any breaks for power consumption from the government.

Secondly, TV. I had been using a projector at home for TV and it has gone through 2 mercury bulbs with the second one being $1800 and exactly 4000 hours in just less than 4 years. A few months short of my original expectation, day-wise, since Alec had been watching far too much TV. Now this is an embarrassing moment, as Samsung has just introduced a series of LCD panel TVs with digital turner built-in. That’s right, this a just in time as a replacement as I had planned even though the projector died early but the problem is, being a brand new product, it cost something like $33K for a 46″ panel!

Forget that. I could have bought a “full-frame 35mm” CMOS for that kind of price.

OK. While snooping around for a replacement projector, I found that the $13500 Panasonic 1280 x 720 2000 lumens projector is now less than $10K. Almost ideal except that it would last another 4000 hours and I would need a different type of 10m $500 video signal cable to replace the one I have.

While snooping around more shops, I found a shop with a Sharp open warehouse sale with several LCD panels on sale for 1/2 of full retail price. OK, so no one sells at full retail and therefore it isn’t exactly half priced. On top of that, these are late 2007 model brand new (not demo but with full manufacturer warranty) units with a few minor scratches on the casing here and there, so they are not really brand spanking new perse but the 46″ one is on sale for $12900. That’s about the price of a 42″ model or about $5000 less than something equivalent.

Had a 1/2 hour discussion with M and we decided to get it. Only 2 model left and another customer was looking at the other unit of the same model, so I quickly told the salesman to pack the one that I wanted. I didn’t want the other one anyway as there was a hot pixel on it. Lucky for me, that other customer want that one instead. To each his own, I suppose!

It is being delivered this evening and I would be able to watch my National Geographic Channels again at about 1/2 the image size. Actually, considering we bought a 40″ 4:3 CRT way back in 1993 at $18800, I’d say we’ve got a better deal than that should we needed to pay for those neon bulbs.

I mean, we are paying 3 times as much for a “camera”, albeit different type and film not counting but for “the equipment that’s being needed to do the same job”, it is now costing us 3 times as much. With the bulb being 5 times as much, it isn’t too bad if and only if they would last long enough to save enough power for their extra costs. At $5000 32″ LCD TV that has a shorter image height than a $1200 25″ CRT.

At least, my 46″ is certainly much more comparable to CRT pricing than others. Happy happy.