TV bargains abound this holiday shopping season
— -- The hunt for that traditional Black Friday quarry, a low-priced HDTV, should be as easy for shoppers this year as shooting fish in a barrel.
That's because a confluence of market pressures has created a perfect buying opportunity for shoppers this season. Economic woes made consumers hesitant to spend on big-ticket items such as TVs throughout the year. That has left retailers with a surplus of displays and sets on hand. Those TVs need to be sold to make room for 2012 models, which will likely include new entries from Apple and Google.
With TV makers expected to add more Net and Web-based connectivity to next year's models, "This holiday season might be the last year you are buying a TV as you know it," says Eric Bleeker, senior technologist at The Motley Fool. In 2012, he says, "Everything on the TV is about to change."
Consumers have put off buying new TVs in anticipation of good deals during the holiday shopping season, says Paul Gagnon, director of North American TV research at DisplaySearch. "In terms of raw demand, we think it could be up for the holiday season."
TV makers have been touting 3D and "smart" features that deliver Internet-based services such as Netflix, but he and other analysts foresee most Black Friday and holiday shoppers focused on the price and size of a TV as the most important aspects of their buying decision.
Retailers are responding to those shopping tendencies. "Price is always the big feature," says Stephen Baker of The NPD Group. "We are going to see a lot of aggressiveness and see a lot more (models) in the very large sizes. People are looking for a really big television as they start to upgrade their flat panels."
Last year, retailers rewarded holiday shoppers with 32-inch displays priced below $200. This year, Best Buy has already broken that barrier with a 42-inch Sharp 1080P LCD display priced at $199.99 starting at 12 a.m. Friday.
(The 1080p stands for 1080 progressive resolution, pretty much the standard for most displays 40 inches and higher. There are some HDTVs that use 720 progressive, which has fewer pixels making up the image and therefore a slightly less crisp picture.)
Lowest-priced display spotted so far? A Dynex 24-inch LCD TV for $79.99 to be available in Best Buy stores, according to BlackFriday.Info.
Elsewhere, 40-inch displays will be found in abundance for $300 or less. Target's Black Friday deals include a 40-inch Emerson LCD HDTV for $265 and a 46-inch Westinghouse LCD TV for $298. Among Walmart's Black Friday offerings: 32-inch and 40-inch Emerson LCD HDTVs for $188 and $248, respectively. A 43-inch Samsung plasma HDTV is priced at $398.
Such low prices might be striking to some, but TV prices have fallen dramatically since 2007. Back then, the average selling price was $935 per TV set, compared with the estimated price this year of $545, according to the Consumer Electronics Association.
Those prices, Gagnon says, "are remarkable to somebody who has been following the industry for a decade."
Low prices can sometimes work in favor of both consumer and retailer. Shopper Brad Pauley, 35, from Westchester, Calif., found himself at the Video and Audio Center near Los Angeles. "What drew me was an ad in the paper," he says. "There was a pretty good-sized TV, 55 inches, for $797."
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