HDTV BUYING GUIDE
With all of the new TV technologies crowding the marketplace, it's time to update our HDTV Buying Guide.
Let's start this Guide with this simple statement. It's a TV. Nowadays, they are bigger and flatter then they were in the 20th Century. They are preceded by HD, but they're still televisions.
All of us want to think that we are making a wise, informed choice and are getting our money's worth, especially in this economy. So let me discuss a few factors that you may wish to consider.
LCD TV BUYING GUIDE
The actual LCD technology is based on polarized light. Polarized panels sandwich a liquid-crystal "gel" that has been already divided into individual fixed pixels. A grid of wires then allows each Pixel to be activated individually and when each pixel darkens it then polarizes at 90 degrees to the polarizing screens. The pixels darken with the amount of voltage that is applied to it. If the display needs to be bright, low voltage is given. Darker areas will receive more voltage.
PLASMA TV BUYING GUIDE
Plasma flat screen technology consists of hundreds of thousands of individual pixel cells, which allow electric pulses (stemming from electrodes) to excite rare natural gases-usually xenon and neon-causing them to glow and produce light. Look very closely at a plasma TV and you can actually see the individual pixel cell coloration of red, green, and blue bars. You can also see the black ribs which separate each.
DLP TV BUYING GUIDE
DLP (Digital Light Processing) technology utilizes a small Digital Micromirror Device (DMD) to tilt more than 1.3 million micromirrors-each of them less than the width of a human hair-toward (ON) or away from (OFF) the light source inside the DLP. This process creates light or dark pixels on the face of the projection screen.