Review Nation

There are many advantages to internet shopping.  Too many, in fact, to list them here in this post.  I do want to focus on one disadvantage of shopping on the internet and that is reading reviews.  I have found myself becoming obsessed with reading reviews before making even the most mundane of purchases.  I assume I am not the only person who does this.  The reviews can be helpful but often I find them to make the purchasing process more confusing.  The absolute worse situation is when you have a product with a 3-4 rating (out of 5) that is littered with a bunch of 1-star and 5-star reviews that contradict each other.

I recently purchased a computer monitor and spent hours doing research and reviews.  There are LCD monitors, and LED monitors, and every other combination of letters you can think of to string together to make an image.  There are monitors that produce "true color" and those that don't, and contrast ratios, and on and on.  I had to do multiple google searches to try to understand the technologies and ratings being fed to me.  Further confusing the picture was that I started to read blogs that would dispute certain monitor stats or contradict something I had read previously.  With all of this confusion I decided to take a different approach.  I knew I wanted a 24"-27" monitor and I knew I didn't want to spend over $250.  So I set my search parameters to match these specifications and decided I would buy the cheapest monitor that was the size I was looking for and had the highest review.  Sounds simple enough, except the above situation happened - I was given a bunch of monitors with mediocre reviews because of conflicting and contradicting information.  I ended up buying a 24" Acer monitor at NewEgg on sale for $120.  I've been quite happy with the monitor thus far, despite the fact that it doesn't display a "true color spectrum."  The problem with internet shopping is that I now spend hours doing research and reading reviews for something that in the past would've taken me just a few minutes to accomplish.

So imagine what happened when my audio-video receiver crapped out on me a few weeks ago.  I went straight to the internet to do research and I fell into the same trap that I fell into when I bought my monitor.  Reviews, and specs, and technology, most of which I don't understand, which prompted additional research.  I've spent two or three hours researching new receivers and still don't know which one I want.  This is such a different experience from when I bought the receiver that died 20 years ago.  At that time I just went to the store and bought the most expensive one they had that I could afford.  Problem solved in just minutes.

Sarah and I were sitting in our sunroom last week and we both came to the conclusion that it would be nice to have a TV in the room.  So I did the unthinkable - I went to Amazon, set the search parameter to the size that I wanted and to sort by best selling, and decided on the first TV that I saw without reading a single review.  I don't even know what technology it uses to display the images.  It was the right size and price, and even though I didn't read any reviews, it did get good reviews (4.5 stars).  Problem solved in minutes, just like the old days.