Looking for a TV Stand

Now that I’ve bought a new TV, I’m looking for a stand for it. I could mount it on the wall, but I just can’t bring myself to trust my skills hanging such an expensive piece of electronics, and I’ll need new storage anyway.

My ideal stand should lift the TV at least 22″ (56cm) from the floor, be at least 49″ (124.5cm) wide and at least 11.4″ (20cm) deep. It needs to be able to support my 83.6 pound (38kg) TV. There should be lots of storage space for movies, and enough space for all my AV equipment as well. Everything should be enclosed somehow, given that all this storage space is at “cat height”. I’m also hoping to keep the cost of this under $200 Canadian.

I did see a nice stand in Zellers that met most of these requirements and was on sale for $230, but I was sure I’d find something better/cheaper elsewhere. Now I’m not so sure, and of course the sale is now over, so the stand is out of my price range.

Looking online, there’s lots of wacky TV stands out there. Fortunately, they’re all out of my price range, so I’m not (significantly) tempted. Sears has one with a pull-out laptop stand. Target has one with a built-in fireplace!

More in line with what I’m actually looking for, the Leksvik from Ikea is nice, but technically not wide enough. This one from US Walmart has awesome storage, but nowhere to put the AV equipment. This other one from US Walmart is almost right, but it looks like the AV equipment is exposed (and the unit’s a touch on the wide side).

I’ve got a couple of weeks to figure this out, though, so for now the plan is to visit a couple of stores and see what they have, and keep searching online hoping to run across anything cool. Of course, if anyone actually reads this and has suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments.

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On Boxing Day morning, I went out looking for deals on a PS3. I ended up getting one from Walmart with 2 free games, inFAMOUS and Batman: Arkham Asylum (I also picked up an extra controller, which was bundled with Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction). Now, I’ve got an older, rear-projection TV, which, for high-definition, only supports 1080i and only through component video, so I wasn’t sure how well the PS3 would work with it – I’d heard in the past that the PS3 doesn’t upscale like my 360 does, and that most games would only be 720p, so if this was right then I would be stuck with standard-definition, which would not look good on my big-screen TV.

When I opened the box to the PS3 later that afternoon, I was very surprised to find that it only shipped with a standard-definition cable, which is pretty much an outrage in this day and age. My 360, which I bought within a year of launch, shipped with support for both! So now I need to go out and get the Sony component cable, which is $35 at Future Shop, and I’m still not sure that the PS3 will actually work right with my TV once I get it. Because there’s a custom connector on this cable on the PS3 side, there’s not much in the way of alternatives; in fact, the “generic” version is actually priced identically at Future Shop. The PS3 does have a standard HDMI output, and HDMI cables are easy to find cheap (as long as I don’t buy them at Future Shop), but my TV doesn’t have HDMI inputs, so that doesn’t actually help.

Amidst Boxing Day shopping euphoria, it seemed perfectly logical that I should look at the TV deals first instead of just buying the cable. After all, new TVs would have all the modern connectors, allowing me to hook up the PS3 and anything else that might interest me without having to worry, and it’s not like there weren’t other issues with my current TV that were starting to annoy. Also, I wouldn’t have to go out shopping again, since it made sense to do the shopping online where I could compare various retailers and look up reviews. And if I didn’t find anything worthwhile, I still had the fallback plan of buying the cable and hoping it worked.

In the end, I bought a Samsung PN50B530, which I pick up in a couple of weeks. It’s a 50″, 1080P plasma model, with all the inputs I need (at least for now). I’ve temporarily hooked the PS3 up to my smaller, standard-definition bedroom TV, so I’m not disappointed by the resolution. When my new TV comes in, I’ll hook the PS3 up to that, move my current big-screen TV into the bedroom, and figure out something to do with my old bedroom TV later.

Of course, now I need to buy some sort of stand….