HDTV Buying Guide

From the days of black and white screens, TVs have certainly come a long way. While we were satisfied with monochrome display, we now demand the best viewing experience from our television screens.

Read on to know what are the differences between a HD-ready TV and a Full HD TV. Learn what 1080i and 1080p is. Boast to your friends what contrast ratio are. With the correct information provided in this guide, when buying your next new High Definition TV, you will never buy the wrong display again!

There are different technologies used to produce your High Def TV. And here are your main 3 different types of HD TV screens.

Plasma TV

Plasma TV uses plasma display panels to produce images on the screen. Their main advantage when compared with LCD TV is that they do not require a light source to brighten up the pictures. They make use of a chemical in the panel, in each pixel, to produce the colors and images. Hence, plasma TV is known for their excellent color accuracy when compared to LCD TVs.

However, as there is an advantage to getting a plasma TV, there will be a disadvantage as well. Over prolonged usage, plasma display panels suffer from "screen burns". The display will start to lose its luminance and color starts to degrade. There is nothing you could do to bring back the color brightness and accuracy and this a non-repairable issue.

LCD TV

LCD TV uses 2 electronic parts to produce images. It uses a backlight unit consisting of CCFL tubes and a liquid crystal display. Depending on the brightness required, the backlight unit and the individual pixels will generate the color with the required brightness.

As compared to the plasma TV, a loss in brightness can easily simply repaired by changing the CCFL backlight unit for a few hundred dollars.

However, LCD TV does not provide the best visual experience that you required. But when compared to plasma TVs, the price of a LCD TV is certainly much cheaper.

LED backlight LCD TV

This is another breakthrough in LCD TVs in the recent years. Instead of using a CCFL tubes to light up the display, it uses LED (Light Emitting Diode) instead. LED uses lesser power in the long run, but they are more costly to manufacture.

There are 2 different ways to light up the screen. Edge LED, as the name implies, LED lights are placed only around the borders of the TV screen. Using a light guiding plate, the illuminance is then distributed to the every part of the display panel of the TV.Another method will be the direct method, where the LED are situated behind the display panel.

While shopping for HD TV for your home, you will certainly encounter these specifications about your soon-to-be-bought TV.

Resolution

The video quality is often determined by the resolution of the TV. Resolution refers to the amount of pixels in your display screen. The more pixels that are available, the sharper and clearer the picture is.

Full HD TV comes in the resolution of 1920 x 1080p or more.

1920 refers to the amount of columns of pixels, while 1080 refers to the rows of pixel in your TV unit. The letter "p" denotes progressive scan which means that your TV will produce 1080 rows of images at a single time, or full image.

However, there are some devices or broadcasters that transmit signal in 1080i format. The "i" refers to interlacing of your image. Instead of transmitting the full image (1080 lines of display) at every frequency (hertz), it send you in alternate lines of display. Eg, 1st, 3rd, 5th, etc row of display on the first, then 2nd, 4th, 6th row of display on the next frequency update.

As this happens extremely fast, usually 60 times per second, our eyes will see the images as a full image. For those with sensitive eyes, they might notice some flickering on the TV screen.

Refresh Rate

This is the rate which the images is bring refreshed on your TV, express in Hertz (Hz). The standards are set at 60Hz for NTSC and 50Hz for PAL signals. However as a marketing technique, TV manufacturers have increase the frequency to 100Hz or even more. However, there is not much difference noted between low frequency and high frequency TV units.

Brightness

This is a term which is purely for marketing purpose. A TV which allows higher brightness setting might not produce better effects. At high brightness, the colors will have a washed out effect and you will detect white "noises" on videos with dark background.

The brightness settings on each manufacturer's HD TV, produced in recent years, is ample for a decent display. However, this HD TV buying guide recommends that you purchase a television screen with at least a brightness specifications of 400cd per meter square.

Contrast Ratio

The contrast ratio is the difference between the darkest black and the brightest white. Generally, the dynamic contrast ratio is listed as part of the specifications. Dynamic contrast ratio is calculated by taking the darkest black and brightest white over a period of time.For most high definition TVs, their dynamic contrast ratio is in the range of 100,00:1 or more. The larger the ratio, the better the ability of your TV to show the contrast between the colors.

Previously, the standard video ports to send video and audio to a TV is the RCA (Red, yellow, white) cable and component cable (blue, green red). Soon later, with the widespread of DVD and demand of better video quality, people discovered that component has limitation in sending quality signals. And this leads to the birth of HDMI and display port video connections.

As at time of writing, HDMI is on version 1.4 which is able to support resolutions of 3840 x 2160 which is double the bandwidth of HDMI version 1.3.

Generally, the newer HD TVs come with at least 3 HDMI ports, 2 RCA and 2 components ports.

Instead of linking up only your DVD player and Blu-ray players, your new high def tv allows you to hook up much more devices than that.

USB and Card Reader Ports

Do you have any movies or music stored in your thumbdrive? Now connect them directly to the USB port of your TV and watch them on big screen, instead of the puny computer monitor screen.

Internet Connectivity

Nowaday, it is not just the computer that is going online. Even the TVs are going online. LAN ports and internet connectivity are built into new generation high definition television screens. Do not be surprised to find a lan cable sticking out a TV. Watch youtube, surf the stock market and get weather reports, it is now possible with these extra features built into the giant TV screens. 

After reading through this hub, do u feel confident about shopping for high definition TV now?

Shop for Panasonic VIERA S1 Series TC-P42S1 42-Inch 1080p Plasma HDTV and

Samsung LN52B750 52-Inch 1080p 240 Hz LCD HDTV with Charcoal Grey Touch of Color

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