Clark Howard's Tips

Clark predicts outrageous flat-screen TV prices to come

Sept. 16, 2008

This is now the third year in a row that Clark is crowing about great deals on HDTV flat-screens for the holiday season. But the deals this year will be so good that he wants to venture an outrageous prediction.

On Black Friday, Clark thinks we'll see lead prices of $499 on 42-inch flat-screens. He has no factual evidence or insider knowledge to support this belief. But there is an oversupply in the factory capacity for making the screens, so Clark believes he may be on the mark.

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There will also be great deals on plasma TVs during the holidays. Plasmas have fallen out of favor even though they're often better than LCDs. If you have a room that doesn't get a lot of natural light, you might want to try a plasma screen.

Most of the deals you'll see will be on 720p resolution screens -- even though 1080p is being marketed as the "full" high-definition television experience. But the signal coming from your cable or satellite company is likely to be somewhere in the 480p-720p range. So there's no need to buy 1080p. You probably won't see much difference unless you're on a 50-inch screen or larger.

Meanwhile, Clark thinks Sony's tiny little OLED screen blows away anything that might wow you right now. So his core advice is to always buy current technology -- not the leading-edge state of the art stuff that always costs too much and will soon be outdated.

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