I agree...I am well educated and work in IT, but when the rubber meets the road, it is hard to make a decision!
I have been trying for several years to buy a new television, but I run into two problems:
1.) My wife gives me the go-ahead to research and buy, I spend months doing research, get ready to pull the trigger, and she tells me to hold off for some reason. This I can respect, because if not for her acumen with our finances, I wouldn’t be in a position to buy. But it makes me feel like a yo-yo!
2.) By the time I finish researching, the content of the field has changed, and I feel obligated to begin the process again to look a the new stuff.
3.) Repeat Item #1!
I don’t watch television, per se. I cannot sit through any of the rubbish, American Idol, I Can Dance, Modern Family and so on. And I won’t watch television based news.
But I AM a dedicated cinemaphile! So this has been great watching movies! After I installed the television (only temporarily, to get it in the right place I need the help of an electrician) I tried putting a few disks in to see how they look, and ended up watching the entire movie “Trading Places”...I only meant to look at a minute or two in order to evaluate the quality, and got stuck...:)
We don’t have cable, but we do have Internet, and the television has built in wireless. It was one of the easiest consumer electronics thing to set up I have ever used. It was brilliant.
I also got a little Apple TV thing, because my wife wanted to be able to easily show slideshows and stuff like that directly from our computer. Because we have a mac, that made sense. It was pretty inexpensive, and wireless too.
I just bought our home theater receiver last night (got everything via Amazon, including wires, etc) a Yamaha Yamaha RX-A800 that seemed to have most everything I wanted. I still have to choose a speaker system and a pair of good quality bluetooth headphones (so my brother and I can watch movies without waking up my wife...:)
Then, I have an electrician coming in to wire things, I am going to mount it above our fireplace, and all of the components will be hidden in a closet with a sliding wooden door, so there will be no wires or components visible.
I bought a Harmony 900 remote that can drive everything without being in line of sight (because THAT REALLY annoys me, having to move your hand around, pointing and clicking until the thing is read)
I convinced my wife to give me a big budget to do it all in...since we won’t be buying for another 15 years or so!
LOL.
This reminds me of a hilarious story from my childhood back in the 1950's. When I was about 12 (I'm 68 now) we got our first B&W TV. My mother (God bless her) was a very proper person who regarded the horror and war movies I loved to watch as pure, disgraceful mind rot and was happy to say so, loudly and often.
Then her downfall came.<[p>
One Saturday night, at about 10:30, the news ended and a grade Z movie, "The Mesa of Lost Women," about a mad scientist who'd taken over a mesa in southwest and was cross breeding women and tarantulas, came on. Mom made the fatal mistake that she'd never be allowed to forget for the remaining 40 year of her life--she watched the first minute and got hooked. She sat there transfixed, watching the rest of it with the same rapt attention you'd see in an 8 year old boy watching "Home Alone" for the first time. All the while Dad and I were laughing uproariously at the whole spectacle of this very proper woman hooked on a horror movie of the very kind she'd regularly denounced as mind rot.
You might want to do a little research on the a/v discussion forums on your Harmony 900. I looked into getting one since I also have a Dish Network Vip722k dual-channel satellite receiver and the Harmony would not operate it. (the second channel is RF, not infrared)
Turns out there are certain proprietary limitations to the Harmony 900's capabilities that aren't quite clear from Logitech's general product description. It may work fine for you, however, just check it out.