Television buying?

ucsd_ucla_dad
Mon, 17 Nov 2008 16:34:01 +0000

If you’re willing to spend the bucks, get an HDTV large flat screen hang-on-the-wall type of TV. Take a look at the pricing and picture for the size you want to get an idea. For TVs under 50" most will be LCD. For larger TVs, there are both plasma and LCD with plasma being more affordable in the larger sizes but LCD is moving into the space and prices working their way down. The projection type TVs are on their way out and tend to have issues with off parallax views.

Unless you’re planning to place it in a very small room, get a larger TV - 50" and above. I replaced a 32" tube TV with a 55" Hitachi plasma TV and it took me about 5 minutes to get used to the larger size screen. Surprisingly, since I have it hanging on the wall it’s less obtrusive in the room than the old 32" tube TV so it’s not an aver-powering size.

HDTV is nice. The detail is much better and the colors are more vivid. The only problem is that there’s a lot of content that isn’t really shot in HD so for those shows it won’t have the detail but some shows look great - shows on the Discovery and NatGeo networks, football games, and some other shows. The ratio of HD content is increasing all the time though as are the HD channels capable of carrying them.