Why thin-flat HDTVs are rubbish: Wall mounting never happens.

Sadly, the world is crazy for thin-flat screens. The world is crazy for thin flats because everyone seems to have bought into a bullshit ideology. Yep, that's right, I said the ideology surrounding thin-flat screens is absolute bullshit, Worse, the poppycock vendors who advance this theory know full-well they are advocating bullshit. They are fully self-conscious bullshit vendors. The bullshit they argue goes a little like this:

You shouldn't buy a DLP screen because:

1. They are about 13 to 17 inches deep.
2. We all live in cramp spaces these days. Most of us are urban apartment renters, and living space is precious in an 800sqft apartment. The lucky ones get to live in a nice townhome.
3. If you wall mount a thin flat screen you will conserve living space, and you will have the most fashionable living-room presentation possible.

I have witnessed a number of friends and family members buy thin-flat LCDs for precisely this set of reasons, and not one of them has yet successfully mounted the unit upon the wall.

But... how can this be? Don't act shocked. My friends and family members are absolutely typical thin-flat buyers. They are statistically average. It turns out something like 87% of all people who buy thin-flats do so with the explicit intension of mounting the unit on the wall... and then they never follow through.

Why don't they follow through? When you witness family and friends go through this ordeal, the reasons become obvious.

• If you buy an HDTV, you are going to need a surround receiver, a Cable or Satellite box, and Blu-Ray player {no, not a DVD player}. You might want an HD TIVO if your company doesn't provide you with a good DVR. All of these components have to live somewhere. The best and most natural place inside media-center furniture, which is naturally equipped with shelf space to house these items. This unit will take 20 inches of space. Try to find something thinner. If you don't buy into the media center, and if you don't rack your video components here, you are opening a nasty can of worms.
• If you try to put your components in a closet, you are going to need a very good closet. Not everybody has one readily available in the family room. It better be air conditioned, because a good surround-receiver will generate plenty of heat. That heat builds up quickly in a confined, non-ventilated space. Heat kills electronic equipment.
• You will need to run a 25 foot to 50 foot HDMI cable to carry the signal from your closet to your HDTV. Speaking of running that cable, most interior decorator, fashion designers don't like the notion of having a 50 foot cable running through the living room. I laugh at them. The alternative is to punch a hole in the wall and have a truly professional handyman run the HDMI cable to that hot closet that disables your remote controls. That is expensive. It is $3000 expensive. My friend Colin toyed with the idea of creating a false wall in front of his real wall in order to avoid this cost. The two costs turned out to be painfully similar. No free lunch folks.
• Once the components are locked in the closet, good luck in using your favorite remote controls. Most of them are Infrared. Infrared waves do not penetrate doors and walls. I guess you can't change the channels, or raise your volume anymore. Nice!
• Speaking of those poor urban apartment renters, good luck in getting the landlord to give you permission to punch holes in those rented walls and run HDMI cable to the closet. I have not seen one request granted yet. Owners don't like punching holes in the walls.
• If you capitulate, give up on wall mounting, and put that thin-flat on a component rack, you have a shelf which is 18 to 20 inches deep anyhow. Guess what? You didn't save any precious living space at all. Worse, you could have easily accommodated that much larger DLP which costs much less than your much more expensive and much smaller LCD. Nice! I bet you feel smart now. You could have had 73inches of DLP for less than those 52inches of LCD.