The Really Big Show
There's more than one way to watch your favorite TV shows and movies on a huge screen. But which one is right for you?Dan Tynan
Daniel Tynan writes the Gadget Freak column for PC World magazine. When he's not watching TV, he's hawking his new book, Computer Privacy Annoyances O'Reilly Media, 2005).
The day I installed a 42-inch Gateway plasma TV in my living room, my life changed. Friends would show up on my doorstep, DVD and popcorn in hand. I received more social invitations. People actually laughed at my jokes. I had finally discovered the secret of popularity: owning a really big TV.
Had I'd known this in high school, I might have been elected school president and gone on to a career in politics. Krista Jacobsen might have gone to the prom with me.
But back in those days the only big-screen TVs were front-projection models that made everything look vaguely purple. Today's big screens look much better and come in a bewildering array of technologies--LCD, plasma, front and rear projection, even some truly enormous tubes. What's the difference between them? How do you decide what to get? This brief guide will help you start.
For purposes of this guide, I've included only TVs whose images measure at least 30 inches diagonally and have a built-in high-definition tuner or or are HD-ready. If you're buying a big screen, it's silly to buy anything that isn't HD.
Direct View Cathode Ray Tube
Image Size: 30 to 36 inches
Price range: $500 to $1900
How it works: An electron gun paints pictures on a screen coated with red, green, and blue phosphors.
Pluses: Plasma and LCD sets may be cooler, but traditional or "direct view" CRTs still produce the crispest images and the widest viewing angle. They're also much cheaper than their flatter cousins, inch for inch.
Minuses: You'll have a hard time finding a screen bigger than 34 inches, and even then, these boxes are huge. For example, the 36-inch Sony Trinitron WEGA weighs in at a gut-busting 245 pounds. Try to move one of these suckers, and you may spend the rest of your life wearing a truss. This limits where you can put the thing inside your house.
Look for: Svelte models like Samsung's SlimFit HDTVs, which feature a tube that's two-thirds the size of a conventional CRT. LG Electronics is also working on thin-tube TVs.
Liquid Crystal Display Flat Panel
Image Size: 30 to 46 inches
Price range: $1100 to $7000
How it works: Fluorescent tubes stream high-intensity white light through polarized layers of red, blue, and green crystals, which open and close in response to an electric current.
Pluses: These are the slimmest, lightest sets you can buy--often just three inches deep. They're also the brightest, making them better for rooms with more ambient light. Images are usually sharp and well-defined.
Minuses: It's hard to find LCD TVs larger than 40 inches, and the big models are more expensive than equivalent-sized plasma TVs. LCDs also can't match CRTs or plasma for deeper blacks or sharper contrast. Some models may be prone to the "screen door effect," where the distance between pixels is visible.
Look for: LCD TVs that offer native support for the 1080-line progressive high-definition format, like Sharp's 45-inch Aquos LC-45GD6U. (Most sets "downconvert" 1080p to 1024 lines before displaying an HD image.)
Plasma Flat Panel
Sizes: 37 to 61 inches
Price range: $2500 to $12,000
How it works: Cells filled with neon or zenon gas are sandwiched between two thin sheets of glass and connected with electrodes. Current passing through the electrodes turns the gas to plasma, which emits ultraviolet light and activates red, green, or blue phosphors residing on another layer of glass.
Pluses: Though slightly heavier than LCDs, a plasma set's slim design and relatively low weight--a typical 42-inch set is about 5 inches deep and 70 pounds--still makes it easy to mount on the wall. Plasmas tend to produce blacker blacks and an overall better picture than LCDs, though not as good as CRTs. Some come with nifty features, like the Philips Ambilight line, which projects a soft pastel-colored light against the wall behind the set. This may not improve the picture, but it will make your living room look more like the VIP lounge at the Viper Room.
Minuses: The good ones tend to be expensive, while the cheapest sets usually offer enhanced definition (not high definition), meaning you won't get the full benefit from an HD broadcast. Quality varies greatly, depending on the electronics built into the set. Plasmas are more vulnerable to burn in; if you watch a lot of 24-hour news or sports channels (or play a lot of video games), text 'tickertapes' and game controls can leave ghostly after-images on the screen.
Look for: Sets that enhance picture quality with post processing, such as Pioneer's PureVision PDP4543HD.
Digital Rear Projection
Image Size: 42 to 71 inches
Price range: $2000 to $6000
How it works: Some older RPTVs project light through a transparent LCD microdisplay onto a reflective screen. Others use digital light processing, employing a chip that uses thousands of microscopic mirrors to reflect light through a rapidly spinning color wheel. The newest technology, Liquid Crystal on Silicon, combines the best of both types, reflecting light off of a chip coated with liquid crystals before projecting it onto the screen.
Pluses: Size. Rear projection models offer the largest screens you can get, for much less than an LCD or plasma flat panel. LCoS provides ultra-high resolution (1080 by 1920 pixels, which is required for achieving sharp pictures on sets 50 inches or bigger), and offers better contrast than DLP or LCD technologies.
Minuses: Size. They're bulkier than plasmas or LCDs, usually ranging from 14 to 18 inches deep and often weighing more than 100 pounds. Some DLP and LCoS models may produce a "rainbow effect" for some users, where they occasionally perceive colors temporarily split into their component hues. Though their picture quality has greatly improved, RPTVs still can't quite match other technologies for sharpness or contrast, especially when viewed from the side.
Look for: Newer models like the InFocus 61md10 or the RCA Scenium Profile line are only 7 inches deep, making it possible to mount them on a wall.
Digital Front Projection
Image Size: 30 to 300 inches
Price range: $1000 to $7000
How it works: The most common digital projectors create images internally using a DLP or a tiny LCD, then employ a powerful lamp and a lens to project it onto a screen or other light-colored surface.
Pluses: Image size is limited only by how far away you place the projector--so you can turn your living room wall into a drive-in movie screen. For example, 3M's Bravo S20 can project a 10-foot-high image from 20 feet away. FPTVs are easily the cheapest way to get a really big picture. Front projectors are also better than standard TVs at displaying computer images, since they were originally built to display PowerPoint slides. And they're highly portable; the S20 weighs about 7 pounds, making it easy to take your show on the road.
Minuses: They require a dark room, which makes watching shows in daylight hours problematic. They don't usually contain a TV tuner, so you'll need to hook them to a cable box or VCR. They can be noisy and run hot. And you'll have to replace the lamps after 2000 to 4000 hours; at $200 to $500 per lamp, that eats up some of your savings.
Look for: As you move up in price, you'll find models like the InFocus SP7210, which offer higher screen resolution, brighter lamps, and picture enhancement technologies such as built-in Faroudja image scaling.