December Shopping Spree: Electronics

Continuing the "December Shopping Spree" series, while last time was all about the books, this time it's all about Electronics.

On the 23rd of December, popular forums are buzzing the Boxing Days/Weeks deals. RedFlagDeals and SmartCanucks were starting to post Online and In-Store flyers. We looked a few of them ranging from BestBuy, FutureShop, and NCIX because these are the remaining electronic stores with enticing deals after A&B Sound went down and under a few years ago. I sometime check out EBGames too but they never have a good online deal and I prefer not to wake up at 6 AM to line up in front of their store at Metrotown.

To our disappointment, we could not find a good deal on things we were looking for. Well...not until the very last minute (^_^). Lo and behold, both FutureShop and BestBuy had a significant discount on LED/LCD/Plasma TVs.

We were looking at two particular TVs: 32" Dynex for $199 and a 43-inch Samsung Plasma HDTV for $299. Wife and I had a short discussion before we decided to get the Samsung from BestBuy.

We figured that we would move the old TV to our bedroom and replace the one in the living room with this.

Our old TV (Westinghouse 32-inch LCD)

Unfortunately, we made a few rookie mistakes:

• We realised the deals a few hours after the opening time of the online promo
•  We took our time to discuss the pros and cons

Because of that, we ended up wasting our time on BestBuy online queue to find out that they had sold-out the item. We then move quickly to FutureShop (phew! thanks to FutureShop for having the same deal!).

We waited for a while on their online queue (similar online queue system used by BestBuy) and finally got the TV!

While waiting for the the queue, I also made a small purchase of  FIFA 2012 for PS3 since it was on sale with $20 off.

We were quite surprised to find out that both BestBuy and FutureShop did quite well when it comes to shipping the items during the hectic season. Fast forward a few days ... and the shipment has arrived (I shipped the FIFA 12 to my office just in case they couldn't ship it within the holiday).

New TV still inside the box

We were a little bit overwhelmed with the size of the TV since both of us had never own a TV that huge. Not even our parents when we were kids (my parents recently purchased a 42-inch TV). 

New TV has established its presence, old TV felt bummed out

Obligatory test using CoD: MW3 for PS3

After we installed the new TV, we moved the old one to our bedroom. Overall, we're quite satisfied with the price we paid.