A Reader said at May 26th, 2007 at 8:27pm

Google ‘free-cycle’ and join your local group, it’s a great way to re-cycle unwanted goods or almost everything infact.

aaron said at May 26th, 2007 at 9:50pm

yeah, i used freecycle to get rid of mine. though, frankly, the person who turned up to take it was less grateful than i’d imagined they would be.

Another reader said at May 27th, 2007 at 6:21am

I’ll also second Freecycle. It’s a service provided by Yahoo, but don’t hold that against it: I’ve got loads of great working stuff (including a hi-fi amp and an overhead projector!) from it and I’ve also managed to get rid of some stuff (a bike and a load of books).
http://uk.freecycle.org/ [edit to UK address - JRC]

Nick Piggott said at May 27th, 2007 at 6:34pm

I’m very surprised. Here in “eco-friendly” Bristol, there’s a CRT recycling bay at the local dump. I was going to take a photo of it today, but it was hissing down with rain so I didn’t. But it did have a Sony Widescreen TV in it. Pester your local council.

ant said at May 28th, 2007 at 3:21am

If it’s so hard to dispose of the old CRT (and you really should have looked into that before buying a replacement) then quite simply don’t. Bear in mind too that in five to seven years that new flat screen will be worn out- welcome to a rotating carousel of consumption of inferior products!

I guess I’m just a little weary of the whole flat screen thing. Take a trip to KW sometime, and talk to the guys there. I swear you’ll be wishing you’d held on to the old CRT.

ant said at May 28th, 2007 at 3:28am

Eek that sounded really harsh! Didn’t mean to. Just worth considering that in many regards the modern flat panel is seriously inferior to the later CRT designs, especially when showing compressed digital video- which is exactly what we’ll be seeing much more of from here on. And the CRT will run and run and run, unlike the flat panel.

The Kingswood Warren research team can show you all the very best and latest technologies and show you all the problems with them- understanding picture quality is a dark art, but new tellys and new transmissions are far from an idea combination!

Adam Bowie said at May 28th, 2007 at 10:48pm

While my eleven year old 32″ widescreen Sony CRT (state of the art at the time) is about as deep as it is wide, and is ugly as sin compared to today’s svelte wall-mounted machines, I’m not going to ditch it until it dies because quite simply the picture quality is so much better than many newer screens. Certainly any in the same sort of price category.

I have this strange compulsion to only replace kit with stuff that’s at least as good as that it replaces, and preferably rather better. Especially if it’s a decade or more older.

The only digital artifacts I see on my screen are caused by inferior compression systems in the digital transmission systems. And I can watch fast moving sports without any motion blur.

No, it’s not HD of course, but then until there’s a reasonable amount of HD content, and preferably a single HD-DVD system to begin investing in, I’m in no rush.

In the meantime picture quality earns the extra floor space that the TV takes up!

Laurie Miles said at June 21st, 2007 at 6:46pm

Well, I just took our ancient Sony widescreen 32″ CRT TV to my 22 year old daughter’s house that she shares with others. It is about 8-9 years old, and the picture was getting a bit darker, but the picture was reasonable still. It is replaced by our Sony 36″ flat CRT that we bought 2 years ago - which has a much better picture, especially for digital images such as DVDs and Sky. However, we have two rooms with TVs in - the other room now has a brand new Sony 52″ flat screen LCD TV. Despite what others have said above, the picture on this is amazing, both for HD sources (Sky HD only at present) and also for DVDs.
The image quality of newer large flat screen TVs can be excellent - especially if you pay for a more expensive one that processes the image to give better picture quality. There is no motion blur at all on the new TV - but it has a huge number of ways of processing the image that can be tweaked. I am convinced that so many flatscreen TVs in showrooms look so poor becaus either they feed in a poor quality SD feed, or else the TVs are not set up for optimal image.