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Get the Picture?
Which television screen gets
the best picture, and which
one should you buy?

BY ANDREW TRAEGER

If you’ve been to any audio-video store lately you’ve probably seen the walls of flat-panel televisions that look alike. Don’t let so many choices and a changing market scare you away from upgrading that television in the living room. The current market is really dominated by only two types of flat panels.

When space and aesthetics are your biggest concern, then a flat-panel television is always going to be the right fit. These are typically just three to four inches thick and can be mounted directly onto the wall. Two technologies are dominating the market right now: LCD (liquid crystal display) and plasma. Don’t know the difference?

We asked the experts for you.
A good salesman can make your shopping experience much less stressful. Here are a few questions your local sales rep, Andy Cobb of Bjorn’s, recommends you have answers to before going to the store.

How far away from the television do you usually sit? This distance can greatly affect how enjoyable your viewing experience is. Too small and you won’t get nearly as much out of the program; too large and it may overwhelm the room, and the picture may not be as clear.

How bright is the room? A bright room requires a television with a higher contrast ratio and an anti-reflective coating, which raises the price a little. With a dark room, almost any contrast ratio will work, and you don’t have to be concerned with how reflective the television surface is.

What are you going to use it for most? If you are planning on mainly playing video games and surfing the Internet, an LCD television is probably the best fit. However, if you only plan on watching high-definition television (HDTV), either kind will work.

How much do you want to spend? This is probably the most important question. A lower price doesn’t always mean you’ll get a bad picture.

After you know the answers to these questions you’re ready to go to the store and start looking at televisions. Remember that, depending on the store you visit, you may not be seeing the full potential of the television. Many big-chain stores use low-quality wiring and a duplicated weakened signal to show off their televisions. However, the television that they have on special may be hooked directly to the DVD player, making the picture look deceptively better than many of the other lowerpriced models. Don’t be afraid to ask your sales person to hook up the television directly to a quality signal.

Plasma
A few more years on the market has really just refined plasma technology, making it far from outdated. For the money, plasma televisions 50 inches or larger tend to be a better buy. If you’re an avid sports watcher, plasma may be a better fit for you because these can handle motion much better than comparably priced LCD panels. Many of these televisions also have darker blacks than comparably priced LCDs.

Two of the biggest arguments for purchasing an LCD panel over plasma are not necessarily true anymore. The two most widely known concerns with plasmas were burn-in and life span. The easiest way to imagine burn-in is to think of an old ATM machine and the images that still appear on the screen after it changes. This primarily affected people who wanted to play video games or who were interested in using the screen as a computer monitor. Many manufacturers have focused on this concern, and it has become less of a problem, not affecting regular television watching at all. A shorter life expectancy has also always been thought of as the another drawback of plasma televisions, but if you actually run the numbers, you’ll realize that it would take over 27 years of watching the average plasma television for five hours a day for the picture to reach half the quality it had when it came new from the factory.

LCD
Because of computer monitors, many people are more familiar with LCD televisions. LCDs still have a few advantages over plasmas. These screens are typically much brighter, so in a well-lit room the image tends to be clearer. They also come in a wider variety of sizes. It’s hard to find plasma televisions smaller than 42 inches, but LCDs are offered in almost any size you can imagine. Even with many of the burn-in problems fixed on plasmas, if you plan to use your television as a computer monitor or mainly to play video games, an LCD monitor would probably be a better fit.

With all of this in mind, the highest-end models for either type of television offer the same technology. The quality of the most expensive plasmas and LCDs is almost identical when it comes to everything we’ve discussed here. So, if you don’t really have a big budget, pick the screen that looks most attractive to you. But remember: You don’t have to buy the highest-priced television in the store to get the best picture.