Are you considering buying an HDTV? Do you know what to look for when you buy an HDTV? Well Philip DiStefano of Tiger Weekly released an article giving consumers advice on what they should be looking for when they buy their HDTV. A very interesting read:

The lowdown on high definition televisions

To a lot of consumers, buying a television used to simply be a matter of choosing a brand and a screen size, but these days, it involves much more than that. One of the initial choices involved is deciding if you want an ever-aging CRT television – the big box sets that most of us probably grew up with – or a flat panel TV, namely LCD or plasma.

Yes, there are other types of televisions, including projection TV’s – and heck, there are projection LCD TV’s, but the main type we’ll be focusing on are the flat panel LCD and plasma sets, as they are the most common and typically most convenient.

Buying one of these sets can be pretty confusing, between the crazy numbers and the acronyms and the metric crap-ton of different kinds of connections the things have, the average consumer might end up buying something they don’t need or not buy something they do need.

First thing’s first – do you want an HD TV or an HD monitor? HD TV’s have cable tuners in them so they can connect to a standard coaxial cable without any additional equipment. HD monitors don’t have a tuner, so you would need a cable box – such as the kind you get for subscribing to digital cable – to actually watch television.

Next is another big decision – LCD or plasma? A minor difference is that plasma screens are typically glossy, and LCD screens are matte, which means that the plasma screens will be more reflective.

If you’re going to play video games or use the set as a monitor for a computer, which can be done since most HD TV’s have a VGA or DVI port to connect your computer to, then you’ll probably want an LCD TV.

The reason for this is that plasma TV’s can get two different kinds of burn-in from leaving stationary objects on the screen for extended periods. Burn-in is when objects still appear on the screen when they shouldn’t, usually in a fuzzy or ghost-like way.

Such objects that cause the first kind of burn-in are things like the icons on a computer’s desktop or the health bar in a video game that are always there and don’t move. This is the bad kind of burn-in that doesn’t go away, but it takes a very, very long time to get that kind of burn-in.

The other kind of burn-in is caused from leaving white stationary objects on the screen for a long time, but this burn in goes away after the TV is turned off for decent amount of time.

LCD TV’s, on the other hand, take so long to get images burned into them, that it’s just easier to say that they don’t get burn-in.

So once that’s decided, you’ve got some standard things to decide. Of course you want HD, but do you want 720p, 720i, 1080i, or 1080p? These numbers denote the amount of vertical lines of resolution on the screen, either 720 or 1080, which are both considered high definition. The “i” on the end stands for “interlaced,” which is an aging display mode. The “p” stands for “progressive scan,” which is a much superior display mode.

Most professionals would just ignore the ‘i” modes that the TV can display and focus on the “p” modes. A set capable of both 1080i and 720p would typically be referred to as a 720p capable television. Thus, a 1080p television is the best a consumer can get, and is typically referred to as “full HD.”

You should also be aware of the number of HDMI connections the TV has, as any HD equipment you hook up to the TV will probably use an HDMI cable or component cables. HDMI, unlike component, is an all-in-one cable with just one thing to plug in on both sides of the cable, whereas with component cables, there are five plugs on each side.

Other than that, you should take the time to carefully observe the TV in a store. Compare it with the other TV’s around it. Make sure the blacks are really black, as some lower-end TV’s will have washed-out blacks. Plasma sets are usually better at having blacker blacks.

A lot can be said just by looking at two TV’s side by side in a store displaying the same video, but keep in mind that these sets may have been messed with by customers experimenting with the set, and there have been reports of stores purposely distorting the picture settings or the video feed of lower priced TV’s to sell the higher priced ones.

The cost of purchasing an HD TV has been in constant decline, so keep your eye out for a good deal on a good set. If you can bear to wait, there are usually a few good deals on the day after Thanksgiving.

- Geoff

[Source: TigerWeekly]