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Re: which tv
There's a lot of factors to consider when choosing the right flat panel TV. Ask yourself these questions first:
1. How far do you plan on sitting away from the screen? This will help determine the optimal screen size. There a several rules of thumb regarding this, but the best one for me has always been:
Screen size (diagonal), in feet, multiplied by 2 = optimal viewing distance for both SD and HD material. TV manufacturers will always say that you can sit 10 feet away from a 70"+ screen, but being the marketeers (did I make up that word?) they are, they base this on viewing HD material, which has a LOT more resolution than a standard NTSC signal. So for example, a 60" screen would be about optimal for a 10' viewing distance (5 feet screen diagonal * 2).
LCD flat panels tend to be more expensive than plasmas, especially when you jump into sizes exceeding 46 inches.
2. Is your room brightly lit during the daytime? LCDs are generally brighter because they use flourescent backlights. Plasmas have glass panels that reflect light very much like a typical CRT.
3. What percentage of movies do you watch vs. normal television? Plasmas in general tend to look better than LCDs when it comes to video scaling and color accuracy (especially with neutral colors like black and gray). However, a much larger percentage of LCDs are available with a native 1080p resolution, where the majority of plasmas are limited to 720p native. The difference in pixels is most noticeable with panels that exceed 50 inches in size. Movies on DVDs almost always look better on plasma screens.
4. Will you hook a computer up to the screen frequently? LCDs look WAY better than plasmas as computer monitors.
5. Most importantly, what is your budget?
As you can see, there's pros and cons to both technologies. The best thing to do is to compare an LCD and plasma side by side playing the same source in a store. And also make sure that the salesperson can show you what standard definition TV looks like too. If he/she can't show you that, walk. EVERY HD flat panel will look good in HD because the TV is doing very little or no upscaling of the original input source. Remember that 90% of the available programming is still only SD and that you'll be dealing with a set that will never look as good as your old CRT did with SD programming. Some flat panels do a better job of upscaling lower resolution video to native screen resolution than others.
Last edited by Nick:G : 12-21-2006 at 08:46 PM.
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