Like clockwork, the prices on televisions follow a regular annual cycle. Knowing when prices will fall could save you some money or at least some …
Like clockwork, the prices on televisions follow a regular annual cycle. Knowing when prices will fall could save you some money or at least some pricing anxiety. Here’s the cycle in a nutshell: CES, Super Bowl, spring shipments, minor summer price drops, fall/Black Friday/holiday major price drops. New TVs are announced at CES in January. They’re not available then, however. There are often sales in the weeks leading up to the Super Bowl in February, but they’re on the previous year’s models. Current model year TVs start shipping in the spring, and that’s when they’re at their most expensive. There’s sometimes a slight price drop in the summer, but not always. During the fall and leading up to the holidays there are usually bigger price cuts. Black Friday and Cyber Monday often have the best deals, on both cheap doorbuster models as well as the best TVs, and those prices can often be had throughout December and the holidays. That brings us back to CES in January and the cycle begins anew. So when is the best time to buy a new TV? It’s not as easy to say “when it’s cheapest” because that’s often when new models are right around the corner. Plus, the cheapest TV might not be the best value. Let’s dig a bit deeper. Forget all the new tech. If your TV works and you’re happy with it, keep it. Don’t feel any pressure to upgrade. Modern TVs are, on average, brighter and have better picture quality than the TVs from a few years ago. Unless you’re the type of videophile who wants to tweak every setting and fixates on nits and color accuracy, however, you probably don’t need a new TV. The pressure to upgrade is pervasive in our tech culture, but TVs tend to last longer, and be perfectly functional longer, than most devices. They don’t, for example, have batteries that lose capacity like mobile phones, or have wires that wear out like headphones. A TV from 5 or even 10 years ago likely works fine, though it might not look as good as the current 4K HDR TVs. So again, if that’s not a huge deal for you, you can likely keep what you have for a few more years. This is even true when considering new consoles, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. If you’ve got a PS4, Xbox One or any console connected via HDMI, the new consoles should work fine.
