LCD TV

A Buyer’s Guide to LCD TV

More often than not, people walk into appliance stores with every intent of buying an LCD TV but without the slightest idea of what they are really looking for. The clues are written all over the place – techie terms and figures such as full HD, 1080p, contrast ratio, etc. --- some of them may even be familiar, yet none seems to make perfect sense. And the usual ending: customers buy the LCD TV that is either more than they’ll need or worth less than the cost.

LCD TV vs Plasma and LED TV

To produce images, the liquid crystal display or LCD technology projects light from a flourescent tube into pixels. These pixels act like small windows that can either allow or block the light. To produce color, these windows then turn translucent with filters of red, blue, or green. With Plasma Display Panel or PDP, on the other hand, instead of pixels, it utilizes small chambers containing ionized gases with electrical charge.

The LCD TV and the Plasma TV go a long way back. Plasmas used to dominate the market with a strong hold over the larger sized TV sets. But owing to its higher picture quality, energy efficiency and quickly dropping productions costs, the LCD made a dramatic market takeover.

Between LCD and LED TVs, the distinction is less obvious, though. LED TVs are essentially LCDs themselves. However, instead of a flourescent tube, they use light emitting diodes (thus, LED) as light sources but still utilize pixels to produce images. These LEDs consume less power and can be turned off, on or dimmed (a process called “local dimming”)to provide better contrast.

In short, all LEDs are LCDs, but not all LCDs are LEDs. Both belong under the category of High Definition Television or HDTV, their criteria are very similar in many ways.

Know where to look and what to look for

Size

Huge TV sets are simply awesome and are quite the head-turners in showrooms. With cash on hand, it’s easy to fall for that larger-than-life, flat screen box. However, aside from size, something else also matters: distance. It’s the reason why no one likes to sit in the front row of a moviehouse.

When choosing the optimum size of an LCD TV, consider the distance of your viewing couch from where you intend to mount your television; the farther it is, the bigger your LCD TV should be. Other sites even have equations to determine the minimum and maximum TV size suited for a given distance. But here’s a simpler solution: Sit in front of your prospect LCD at a distance where you’d likely sit in your house and feel how comfortable it is for you. For sure, other people will look at you. But remember that it’s not their eyes and neck on the line.

Bigger LCDs, aside from just being spectacular, do have their advantage. High-resolution is quite the trend in television sets these days, and LCDs with screen size 40” and up are the ones which make the most of the 1920x1080-pixel resolution. Anything less than 40” and you’re better off buying a 1280x720 LCD for less the price.

Screen resolution

A closer inspection of an LCD TV’s resolution will reveal a letter appended to the figure such as “1080p” or “720i”. The letter “i” stands for interlaced, which means that every other row of pixels are projected at different intervals resulting in a wave-like pattern. But since they flicker too fast for the eyes to detect, the image produced looks whole.

The letter “p”, on the other hand, stands for progressive and is the current standard for LCD TVs. Unlike the interlaced resolution, all pixel rows in a progressive resolution are displayed simultaneously at any given time. It gives the picture more integrity and better color contrast thus giving rise to the term “full high definition” or simply “full HD”.

With this knowledge in mind, one should expect that progressive or full HD LCDs are more expensive that their interlaced counterparts. Visually, their differences are subtle, yet with television sets, it’s the small things that count.

Edge-lit or back-lit

For marketing purposes, HDTV manufacturers had to coin the term “contrast ratio” to quantify how black a TV’s black level is. You will see dazzling figures under this gauge, but in truth, a universal standard for HDTV contrast ratio is still a matter of contention. A better solution here is to bring a good copy of a movie with lots of night scenes and shadows, ask the salesman to play it and see which LCD TV has the better.

You may also do well to pay attention to whether your prospect is edgelit or backlit. This is an option more appropriate for LED TVs, and not for the purely LCD sort. Edge-lit TVs have their LED lights on every side of the screen. They’re cheaper and more cost-effective. Back-lit TVs, on the other hand, have their LED lights coming from behind the screen giving a better color contrast and brightness--- a better choice for watching movies with lots and shadows and night scenes. Here, the choice between cost and quality is pretty much yours.

Frequency

Frequency or frames per second is, in simpler terms, the rate at which the pixels turn off and on to produce the picture. Its unit of measurement is Hertz (hz) with choices from 60, 100, 200 or even 240 Hz. The higher the value, the sharper the images are.

Higher frequencies are better for sports fanatics but some of the TV drama type might be put off by the “soap opera effect” where images become too sharp, they look like plastic. This is because most TV networks only broadcast at 60Hz and the frequency mismatch forces an LCD TV to compensate or “interpolate” by adding additional frames. Blu-ray discs also tend to benefit from higher-frequency LCDs as well so if you do have a lot of them at home, you’d what to pick.

Don’t get over-excited by new features

Wireless connectivity and wifi ability are just some of the additional features currently offered by HDTVs. However, other devices may already offer the same and some features may require you to buy more add-ons to fully enjoy them. So it’s better to treat them as bonuses and stick with the bare essentials.