Rant 1,117: How Big Is Too Big?

I love television.

I always have.

My mother tells me that when I was a baby in the crib, when she would put on "American Bandstand," I would jump up and down like my bed was a trampoline.

TV has changed over the years, and I am not necessarily talking about the programming, which has changed drastically since the days of that show and "I Love Lucy" and all those classic shows from that time.

Where once we had televisions which were as much furniture as a couch was, we moved to portable TVs, which were smaller but more flexible in where you could position them.

Then, just in the past few years, we moved into the digital age, and TVs are now pretty garish, black, rectangular devices that have to be hooked up by wire to something to get programming.

Somewhere in the past six decades, the electronics industry came up with a measurement for TVs that is really outlandish, measuring the screen diagonally to get its size.

So you have 32-inch TVs that really aren't 32 inches, but their screens are using that rate of measurement.

Anyway, to get to my point, there are TVs of every screen size now, from the 20s into the 60s and above.

At the Consumer Electronics Show, Sharp has just debuted an 85-inch TV. It has all the bells and whistles you would expect from such a TV--such as 3D--and it is huge.

And Sharp isn't the only TV maker with such a huge TV--I believe Samsung has one too, among others.

Why anyone would want an 85-inch TV is beyond my comprehension.

First of all, who has the room for such a TV?

Even if you have a large room, a room dedicated to home theater, 85 inches is really, really huge, almost akin to watching TV in a movie theater.

Secondly, does one really need such a large TV?

The "measurement of a man," in popular terms, used to be what type of car he drove.

Today, it seems to be what size TV he has.

My family has three TVs, actually four if you count the TV we use for my son's video games, which is a dedicated TV for that purpose.

They run in size from 21 inches to 32 inches, and really, that is all we need to watch TV.

We don't have a home theater room, but even if we did, 85 inches would be a bit much.

And the price ... don't get me started on that.

Going back to what I said earlier, TVs today are highly functional, but compared to TVs of old, they are pretty garish, just being black rectangles with large screens.

They aren't furniture anymore, and they certainly aren't portable.

Sure, we don't have the ghosts and the interference that those TVs experienced, but heck, we learned to live with that, didn't we?

I don't know, 85 inches to me is a basketball player at more than 7 feet tall, not a TV size.

But I can guarantee that that basketball player will really look his full size on these TVs.

I guess such a TV is a slam dunk to some, but to me, give me a smaller TV anytime.

The question again is, "How Big Is Too Big?" and I believe this set has answered that question with its size.