Originally by: PETER PUTMAN, CTS
If you are like many consumers who are in the market for a new television, you’ve probably dreamed about making it a plasma or LCD flat screen HDTV.
Maybe you spent some time looking over the Sunday circulars from Best Buy, Circuit City, and other major retailers. Perhaps you spent some time on the Internet, shopping around for the best price. You may even have read a few product reviews here and there.
It’s also probable that, like your fellow shoppers, you aren’t quite sure exactly what the difference is between LCD and plasma. Sure, they’re both flat. One seems to be brighter than the other, but a little washed out at times. Some are marked HDTV — you might know what that means — but what does ‘EDTV’ mean?
Is your new flat-screen TV going to ‘burn in’, ‘burn out’, or burn up? Just how long will it last before you have to replace it? Does the gas leak out of a plasma TV? Will sunlight hurt your LCD TV?
And just who are all of these companies selling LCD and plasma TVs? Sure, you’re heard of Sony and Samsung, Panasonic and Philips, Polaroid and Toshiba. But who the heck is Maxent? Funai? Ovideon? Syntax? Vizio?
For us journalists, covering the fast-growing market for plasma and LCD TVs can be a real challenge at times. For consumers, it can be frustrating, confusing, intimidating, and expensive. There are an awful lot of products to choose from, but they’re not all ‘created equally’. Nor do they offer the same resolution and connector options.
In the interest of clearing up some of this confusion, I’ve prepared a list of things you should know about plasma and LCD TV technology, and some shopping tips to take along when you are searching for the ‘perfect’ flat screen TV. You know the old saying — ‘forewarned is forearmed!” (I won’t get into technical discussions of how plasma and LCD TVs work; you can find that information elsewhere on this web site.)
THE FACTS ON PLASMA
Both plasma and LCD technology are ‘mainstream’. Numerous companies sell these TVs in a variety of sizes, and prices are dropping faster than an elevator with a broken lift cable. Because of increasing consumer demand (and the fact that the United States is the #2 market worldwide for TVs), plenty of companies have gotten into the game.
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