JuJuDeals

So you want to choose a TV, but you’re still trying to make up your mind about features you need? Consult this handy guide for a few pointers!

• 7″ Portable LCD TV- This handheld device is the smallest of the group, which also means it’s the most portable. It’s ideal for tossing in a backpack or glove box so you can catch some shows when you’re stuck somewhere. It’s also a great set to have during an emergency in case traditional TV reception is rendered impossible, as it will let you catch any important information, developments, or emergency broadcasts.
• 9″ Portable LCD TV- Like the one above, only with a larger screen. It performs all of the above functions, trading increased screen size for a slightly larger body. If you want a portable TV, and don’t have to worry about packing things down to the smallest possible size, there’s no reason you wouldn’t love this one.
• 15″ LCD HDTV- Now we’re getting into the non-portable models. This 15″ TV needs to remain moored to some manner of power source (either AC or DC will do), but it trades up in image quality with a fantastic High Def picture. It also plays DVDs thanks to an in-unit disc player. This set is great if you want to install a TV on your RV, boat, or semi-truck, but don’t have a whole lot of space to work with. It’s also wall-mountable, meaning it can get installed just about anywhere.
• 19″ LCD HDTV- A decent size upgrade from the 15″ without becoming too unwieldy, the 19″ does everything the 15″ does, but bigger. With its HD picture, you really get the most out of the screen size.
• 22″ LCD HDTV- This is the largest size 12 volt HDTV you can get! If you have the space on a boat, semi, or RV, this is a great choice for your main TV and DVD player. Like the 15″ and 19″, it’s wall mountable, functions with either AC or DC power, includes an in-unit DVD player, has its own speakers, can intercept digital TV signals, and has a remote control.

As you can see, there are a wide variety of TVs to meet any of your traveling and watching needs. Just pick the one that fits your life!

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

And now: the finale!

As you drive up a tall, wide overpass, the music on the radio goes quiet and the voice you were hoping to hear begins to vibrate from the speakers. You pull over to the side of the road, notice how pretty the night sky is when there aren’t a bunch of headlights going by, and breathe a sigh of relief as the voice begins talking about safe zones.

“This is an emergency broadcast. The following counties have been quarantined.”

Your heart sinks as you hear a laundry list of familiar places. This infection really came out of the blue, and it seems no one was ready for it.

“If you are listening to this from inside a quarantine zone, find a secure location and stay there until further notice. If you are listening to this from outside a quarantine zone, and you have not already been evacuated by military personnel, report to one of the following safe zones as soon as possible. They are well fortified, well stocked, and checking for infection. They are, for the moment, the safest place you can be during this crisis.”

The voice then proceeds to list off several locations -a few military bases, a few ranch houses, an outlet mall, a quarry- that are scattered about the region. You recognize the name of a base, and make up your mind to head to it immediately. You should have just enough gas. Hopefully. However, your train of thought is interrupted when a large RV careens by you, banking dangerously back and forth between the retaining walls of the overpass. Before toppling over the rail, it scrapes to a stop at the overpass’ highest point; the right side of the rig flush with the steep drop off. You throw your car into drive and quickly pull up to the vehicle to investigate. The RV has Auto Club and Good Sam Club stickers on it.

You can hear the sounds of struggle inside the rig, and decide to enter. There’s a fellow that looks like warm-weather Santa Claus at the wheel, and he’s pinned down by a snarling man with pasty skin. The Santa Clause guy is managing to keep the beast’s snapping jaws from taking a chunk out of him, but just barely. He sees you and bellows (in the politest bellow you’ve ever heard) “Think you could gimme a hand!?” You look around for something solid to swing, pick up a nearby clock radio, and give the infected drone a full-force braining. Stunned by the blow, the ghoul relents just long enough for Santa to shove it out the open passenger window, where it enjoys a brief, exciting tour of gravity.

“Whew! Thanks, partner! I need to choose my travel-mates better. Picked him up a few hours ago, said he just had a stomach ache. I knew he’d been in the bathroom too long…”

You make your introductions, check yourselves for bite marks, and find out you were both headed to the same place. After siphoning your gas into his tank and bringing your gear in, you and Santa head down the road to safety. He says he gets satellite, so you flip on his 22″ 12 volt TV and flip around for news. From what you can gather, the contagion has pretty much been contained to the continental United States. You just missed the President speaking from aboard Air Force One, but pay rapt attention when an official begins detailing plans to get the crisis under control. You turn up the volume for Santa’s benefit.

“…and so far, all of the secondary tests have confirmed what we’ve found in our preliminary research. We repeat: people infected with the virus can not bear to come into contact with large doses of sodium. Salt. If you have any salt, be it table salt, sea salt, some manner of chemical or industrial sodium processing agents, you can dilute it in water and provide yourself with a very effective defense. We’re currently working on manufacturing, distributing, and implementing large amounts of such a sodium solution.”

You and Santa can barely believe your ears. Salt. Guess the infected won’t be visiting the ocean any time soon. It suddenly dawns on you that TV can be pretty useful sometimes.

We are, of course, talking about your RV, if you have a surround sound system set up to accompany your 12 volt TV (and if you don’t, you should, cause you’re basically driving around in a swanky living room). If you’ll pardon another 2001: A Space Odyssey reference, setting up your surround sound can be frustrating enough to make you beat the ground with your remote like a monkey with a bone. Where do the speakers go? Why does everything sound so horrible? WHY IS THIS SO DIFFICULT?! It doesn’t have to be! Like an all-knowing monolith, the JuJuDeals team is here to guide you to the next stage of human development. Or television enjoyment. Whichever.

For the purposes of this tip guide, we’re assuming you’ve already researched and purchased the kind of speakers you’ll be needing. What we’re principally concerned with here is proper placement. What you don’t want to do is just put the speakers in the four corners of your RV. Before you place your speakers, you need to find what is usually called your “sweet spot.” Stop laughing, children, or it’s detention for all of you. The sweet spot is the place you’ll ideally be doing most of your viewing from, so go find the comfiest seat in your RV. Go on, it’s okay. We’ll wait.

…

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Okay, good, you’re back. What took you so long? Seriously, we didn’t say we’d wait all day. Well whatever. Did you find the sweet spot? Excellent. Now you need to consider where it is in relation to your 12 volt TV. Is it directly across from it? Is it at an angle? In either case, you want to orient your speakers, as much as you can, around the sweet spot when you are directly facing the TV. Just pretend you’re this smug little guy, and try to place your speakers as follows:

You wish you were as cool as this guy.

Now, there are all kinds of other hassles to hack through, like adjusting levels depending on what kind of media you watch most, choosing the best cables for high audio fidelity, etc. But that is a guide for another time. For now, sit in that glorious sweet spot and enjoy the music.

No, it’s not a bizarre reworking of the beloved Tom Selleck crime-busting show Magnum: P.I., though we at JuJuDeals certainly appreciate the heroic efforts of the fantastically mustachioed champion of justice. You may have noticed one of those two letters (”p” and “i”) following a set of numbers like “1080″ or “720″ on an HDTV you were eyeballing, and taking a cue from the brilliant, deductive mind of Magnum P.I., you just had to know what they mean.

Well wonder no more, detective.

In this case, the P’s and I’s we’re referring to stand not for “Private” and “Investigator,” but instead for “Progressive scan” and “Interlace.” Interlace was, until recently, the standard way to broadcast and view television images. See, unlike the flipbooks you used to make in elementary school by drawing in the corners of your textbooks, standard definition TV didn’t just show a series of complete, unadulterated frames in rapid succession. It used a method called “interlacing,” where it cut out every other row of pixels and replaced them with the rows that would have appeared in the next frame.

Imagine a set of horizontal window blinds with an image projected on them. Now imagine that behind the blinds was an accompanying image that would have followed the original in sequence. What interlacing did, essentially, was open the blinds halfway, slicing the two pictures so that you saw half of the first image and half of the second. This was to smooth the illusion of motion that TVs trick your brain into perceiving. It was a good idea, but you did lose quite a bit of image clarity.

Then came all these newfangled HDTVs and High Def computer monitors and what-have-you, which can show you things in Progressive scan mode. This is a lot more like the flipbooks you got sent to the principal’s office for making. Progressive scan TVs show you the complete, individual frames at high speeds. Pause the picture, and the image will be complete, perfect, and still, like looking out a window at someone else’s way more interesting and action-packed life.

Simply put, “i” is okay-but-outdated, and “p” is as true-to-life as we can make it…

For now.