Essential requirements of buying a HDTV (1 Viewer)

[Scott W.]

I'm wondering what things I should have included in a new 30-50 inch widescreen tv. What I know so far is that it has to be in High Defenition (duh), also in widescreen (16X9)and a digital tv. One part I'm not sure about is this recent 'Plasma' tv talk. Is there such a thing as a HD Plasma tv? If their is such thing, is it better... with plasma or not? Any advice would be appreciated. TIA. =)

Scott

 

[Allan Jayne]

There are a lot of "HD" (usually 720 x something, 768 x something or 1024 x something for pixels) plasma TV's out there also a lot of non-HD (480 x something) ones.

For an HD plasma TV you want to be sure it displays 1080i HDTV shows with the resolution of the screen (768 x something or whatever), not an identical upscaling of each 540 line video field yielding but 540 lines of vertical resolution that is easier to skimp with. Unfortunately I don't know how to verify this as HDTV test patterns are hard to come by.

Video hints:
http://members.aol.com/ajaynejr/video.htm