Sitting the right distance from your Plasma TV is an important part of optimizing the viewing experience. Sitting too far away from a small- or medium-sized screen definitely diminishes the overall impact. At the same time, sitting too close to a large screen is also less than ideal. A good indication that you’re sitting too close to a screen is if you find that you’re distracted by being aware of the screen’s structure , those tiny pixels, and for CRT based TVs, horizontal scan lines. If you’re not sure how far away you should sit for optimum viewing, consult our suggested viewing distance calculator.
There are differing opinions on the best way to determine optimum TV viewing distance. Generally, you calculate viewing distance by multiplying one of the screen’s dimensions (height, width, or diagonal) by some fixed number. The rule-of-thumb generalizations for standard analog TVs with 4:3 aspect ratio no longer hold true for newer HDTV sets and HDTV-ready TVs. These high-resolution models include upconversion circuitry and wider 16:9 aspect ratio screens. High-resolution displays reduce the visibility of scan lines, so you can sit closer without noticing them.

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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High-definition television

High-definition television (HDTV) is a digital television broadcasting system with higher resolution than traditional television systems (standard-definition TV, or SDTV). HDTV is digitally broadcast because digital television (DTV) requires less bandwidth if sufficient video compression is used.

HDTV broadcast systems are defined threefold, by:

• The number of lines in the vertical display resolution.

• The scanning system: progressive scanning (p) or interlaced scanning (i). Progressive scanning simply draws a complete image frame (all the lines) per image refresh, whereas interlaced scanning draws a partial image field (every second line) during a first pass, then fills-in the remaining lines during a second pass, per image refresh. Interlaced scanning requires significantly lower signal/data bandwidth, but an interlaced signal loses half of the vertical resolution and suffers “combing” artifacts when showing a moving subject on a progressive display (although the worst effects can be mitigated by suitable image post-processing known as ‘deinterlacing’). As some compensation, however, interlaced mode provides finer time-sampling, giving two (half-resolution) image samples in the same time interval as one (full-resolution) image sample in progressive mode.

• The number of frames per second or fields per second.