For most people, buying a new TV involves determining which TV will provide the best picture for their money while also staying within their budget.
However, getting the “right TV” requires doing a bit of homework before you get wowed by the first big TV you see in the store.
Having already answered some important questions ahead of time, you’ll be able to consider the factors covered in this guide in terms of what might work best for your needs.
Things to consider first:
1. Room lighting, and what time of day you or your family will be watching the most TV
2. Where and how the TV will be set up; what room it will be in
3. Where in the room the TV will be viewed from
TV Types
Liquid crystal display (LCD): A flat panel display that uses the light modulating properties of liquid crystals to display images. These crystals do not emit their own light; instead, an LCD display requires a backlight. Current models use LED’s for backlighting. Higher performing models may have full LED arrays for even lighting, but to reduce costs, some models may be edge-lit instead. The necessity for backlighting results in lower contrast ratios than are seen in other technologies, like OLED or plasma, though “local dimming” can help significantly in reducing this. Other drawbacks of LCD displays are motion blur and judder, though higher refresh rates and processors that insert additional frames can ameliorate this effect (though this in turn causes other issues, like the “soap opera” effect).
Plasma display panel (PDP): Plasma technology uses a display made of tiny cells filled with ionized gases, each pixel having cells with phosphors for each primary color. Current flowing through these cells produces light of that color, creating a dynamic image. Comparatively, this display method has a high performance to cost ratio. It does not suffer from motion blur due to the way the image is created on the screen (meaning it does not need a higher refresh rate to smooth out motion artifacts) and has high contrast ratios, showing deeper blacks than LCD screens. Plasma is also observed to have a wider viewing angle than LCD. Drawbacks of plasma displays include “burn-in” and size limitations- plasma displays are not created smaller than 42 inches due to “screen door” effect, and are not meant to be viewed closer up than recommended. Plasma displays also tend to use more power. Though plasma displays do not suffer from motion blur like lower refresh rate LCD’s, they can exhibit judder upon horizontal panning of images on the screen. Newer plasma technologies like “frame repeat” address this issue.
Organic light emitting diode (OLED): These displays use organic molecules that emit light when electronic currents are sent through them. This is the newest and best TV technology on the market, but is correspondingly too expensive to be worth the cost for most buyers, so here we have focused our discussion on LCD’s and PDP’s.
Now that we’ve covered the background on the different types of TV’s, it’s time to apply it to your needs.
Room lighting: In a room with lots of bright lights or lots of natural light, and when the TV will be used primarily in this setting, an LCD display is hard to beat. They come with anti-glare screens with matte surfaces, and can be very bright, making it much easier to see images on the screen, even with lots of ambient light. However, in a dark room, most LCD’s can’t compete with plasma displays when it comes to picture quality due to the high native contrast ratio afforded by plasma technology. As mentioned above, technologies like local dimming can help this, but as a whole plasmas are considered to have better image quality in a dark environment.
Where and how will you be setting up your TV? New TV technology means that TV’s are getting lighter and thinner, but it is still a significant detail to consider the weight of your new TV, more for logistic reasons than anything else. Are you going to have to carry your new TV up the stairs by yourself? Can your entertainment center support the weight of the new TV? Will it fit? If you are mounting the TV on your wall, you’ll need to know the size and weight of your TV to get a proper wall mount. In addition, you’ll need to know whether or not there are studs in the wall behind where you are planning to attach your wall mount. If there aren’t, you may need to get a little more creative with how you anchor your TV mount. There are ways; it just takes a little more research, and you may want to hire someone if you aren’t handy with home improvement projects.
Where will viewers be viewing the TV from? If you have a large living room and regularly have multiple people spread out in the room watching the TV, or if the TV is meant for a room where the viewer might be moving around quite a bit (like the kitchen), then viewing angle may be an important factor for you. Plasma TV’s are often said to have better viewing angles in practice, though on paper they are technically comparable to LCD’s. In choosing an appropriate size, it is also important to consider how far away your TV will be from the primary viewing location. Rather than adding features, stepping up in size tends to be a better value for your money. Many people will say that bigger is always better, and you should get the biggest TV that fits in your budget that fulfills all of your other criteria. Want a more exact method? Measure the distance between where you will be sitting and where the TV will be. Convert that number to inches. To figure out what a good recommended diagonal TV length would be, multiply that number by .84 (to get the recommended size according to THX), and by .625 (to get the recommended size according to SMPTE). Anything that falls in that range should be acceptable. CNET recommended .667 as a good multiplier, which is larger than SMPTE’s recommendation but smaller than THX’s.
At this point you should be armed with enough information to at least narrow down your choices to a particular type of TV, though there are still plenty of things to consider before choosing a specific model. Good luck!
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