Getting a Super-sized view

It is the year of the high definition Super Bowl.

A number of Beatrice area residents will be watching this year's Super Bowl in high definition as they take advantage of dropping prices and manufacturers' rebates on high definition, flat panel televisions, Beatrice television retailers said.

“That is the hot thing,” Stan Meyer, owner of Brand Source Store in Beatrice, said. “It's been huge this year.”

An estimated 2.5 million Americans will be purchasing a new television for Super Bowl Sunday this year, according to a recent national survey, and Beatrice retailers are seeing some of the prophecy with a busy week of scheduled deliveries and installation for new television sets purchased by customers, just in time for the Super Bowl.

“It's been pretty busy,” Greg Buchta, owner of Daubendiek TV and Appliance in Beatrice, said. “We're doing a lot of installation, wall mounting.”

Sunday's showdown between the Chicago Bears and Indianapolis Colts is amplifying a high-definition TV buying frenzy that already was under way thanks to a 20 percent to 30 percent drop, in some cases a 40 percent drop, in prices from a year ago and heavy promotions by retailers and manufacturers.

“A lot of people want them and they've been waiting for prices to come down,” said Mike Gatti, executive director of the Retail Advertising and Marketing Association, which conducted the nationwide survey on consumers' TV buying intentions in early January. “They're still not cheap, but they're starting to get within range of people who are saying 'Gee I'm going to get one now.”

Retailers in Beatrice said the television buying season has been going strong for them since November with people buying new televisions for the Christmas holiday and for the College Bowl Games. Now people are purchasing them for the Super Bowl.

Other than the drop in prices, Beatrice retailers are saying people have found the advantage of purchasing new television sets because of the better quality and options they can get with them.

“The high definition pictures are remarkable,” Meyer said. “There's such advantages to buying new TVs.”

Meyer also added that many are going ahead with new television purchases because eventually many of the older televisions will be obsolete.

The most popular new television choices have been the plasma and LCD flat panel screens, retailers have said.

“Plasma has been very popular, along with LCD,” Buchta said.

At Meyer's store, he said the most popular television has been the LCD, outselling plasma 10 to one, he said.

“There both nice, but LCD is more popular,” Meyer said.

In Chicago, where the Bears are making their first Super Bowl appearance in 21 years, flashy flat-panel sets are in demand like never before. A surge in business that followed the team's Jan. 21 victory in the NFC championship game generated holiday-sized crowds of customers in the home theater departments of Best Buy stores for days, according to the nation's largest consumer electronics retailer.

Some buyers weren't waiting for installation appointments. Rushing to properly equip their homes for parties, many shoppers said they would stand their flat-panel sets on the floor for the game and get them properly mounted later, according to Mike Obucina, a supervisor at a store on the city's northwest side.

“Because the Bears won, it literally made people say 'I'm done waiting, I'm going to go get my flat-panel TV,” he said.

Abt Electronics, a gigantic family-run store in north suburban Glenview, Ill., that claims to sell more televisions than any other single store in the country, sold about 170 large-screen TVs a day in January during a traditionally slow month gone crazy. That made it its busiest month ever for TV sales.

Money isn't necessarily an object. On one recent day at the 70,000-square-foot showroom with fountains, granite and marble floors and vast aisles filled with high-def goodies, shoppers were examining 50-inch televisions by Bang & Olufsen for $20,000 and even an 80-inch set dubbed “The Ultimate Plasma TV” for $150,000.

“People don't care about price,” Mike Abt, president of the business his grandmother founded in 1936, said happily. “They're asking the salesmen what's the highest-quality set.”

Bears fan Larry Kugler bought a 46-inch flat-screen TV for $2,700 and had it shipped to his second home outside Aspen, Colo., in time for a Super Bowl party he's hosting for friends from Chicago.

“I want to make the experience a little bit better than viewing it on a 26- or 32-inch glass TV,” the 40-year-old Chicago cleaning contractor said. High definition, he said, “just really enhances watching a sporting event. You can get a better feel for the performance on the field.”

Even the non-wealthy can afford a quality system, although it will get a little pricier once Super Bowl sales end.

Among the biggest sellers for the month, retailers say, have been 42-inch high-definition sets for as little as $1,000. Even with additional costs - roughly $200 for installation, $100 for cords, a minimum $200 for five surround-sound speakers and the price of a subscription to HDTV content - the final tab could come in under $2,000.

Bump the spending up to $5,000 and you can get a 50-inch set and a much better audio system.

Or on an unlimited budget you can always fork over $200,000 for a home theater system. After all, a 2004 poll by Best Buy Co. Inc. found that men surveyed would rather watch the Super Bowl on a great home theater than enjoy the game in the company of the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders.

Consumer anthropologist Robbie Blinkoff says the growing obsession with big-screen TVs on Super Bowl Sunday makes it easier for people to enjoy a shared group experience, albeit in a very American way.

“Nothing compares to football for TV buying,” said Abt. “Not the NCAAs, not the World Series - nothing.”

The Associated Press contributed to this story.