Buying Guide : Flat Panel Television

Dear Readers, this time I have researched on how to buy  flat panel televisions, and I am sharing my article on the same, just on the side line, I own, 42 Inch Full HD, Videocon LCD bought 4 years back.

Now if you have decided to grab a new television, to replace your old TV then this guide can be useful to you as when you will step in any store, the salesman will confuse you with many technical jargons which are even not important to consider while making buying decision.

Confused between LCD / LED / Plasma???

In LCD TV, the display is powered by Liquid Crystal Display & CFL bulb, which consumes more power than LED TV, whereas Plasma TVs have better viewing angle but consumes more power than LED TVs for same size. So if you want to keep check on power consumption you shall go for LED TV but those are little bit costlier compared to Plasma & LCD. Power consumption is as follows…

 LED < LCD < Plasma

Size:-  As far as size is concerned, there are many options available in market ranging from 19 inch to 65 inch, now which size to prefer, there is standard formula for it.

If your viewing distance is 5 feet = 60 inch, than minimum size of TV you shall take is 60/3 = 20 Inch and at the max you can go for 60/1.5 = 40 inch.

You can calculate as per your viewing distance, viewing distance is considered between your sofa / couch to the place where you want to place your TV.

Now say if you are choosing TV for your bedroom then you can go for minimum size but if you are choosing TV for Living room or Hall you can go for anywhere in between to min & max TV size, depending on your budget.

Thumb rule is “bigger is better”, depending on budget as larger screen size will cost you more.

Dynamic Contrast Ratio:-

This is the term that you will come across while checking any TVs specification, and varies from 100000:1 to 1000000:1 now a days. Every company has different measurement method to measure these contrast ratios, so you can’t judge different set of televisions by merely reading the contrast ratios specs, better is to go to store and compare with your eyes only.

Previously there were only static contrast ratio only  but now a days tv manufacturers trick ( read dimm the light / switch off the light in the areas where black picture has to be shown) the LED / CFL lights in the panel to generate more contrast while displaying black color scene on display panel.

So this one is really tricky and not to give much importance if you feel that you like a TV set which has laser Dynamic Contrast ratio than the one shown by sales person!

HD Ready / Full HD:-

A television set which has inbuilt HDTV tuner is called Full HD TV, and the one which requires external tuner such as HD SET TOP BOX is referred as HD ready.

In simpler terms Full HD TV will be able to receive HD signal on its own directly from air, like we receive DD from antenna, however no channel in India is transmitting over the air HD broadcast.

Whereas for HD ready television to display HD content, you need to connect external HD sources like any DTH company’s HD set top box.

Considering scenario in India you can go for HD ready TV also, because in India as of now HD broadcast is available thro DTH operators only. But if budget is not constraint one shall go for Full HD. For 32inch TVs price difference in HD ready and Full HD tv is hardly Rs 2000 to Rs 3000 only but larger the screen sizes bigger the difference is!!!

Refresh Rate:-

As we know that, television is a series of images, shown rapidly enough that your brain sees it as motion, now in old LCD television quite a few years back while watching sports you must have observer spot of colors moving along the image creating blur, this is because pixels in the screen where not able to respond at the rate the images move in program, and in old television sets, in one second each frame is shown for 60 times, resulting in blurs.

To avoid this blurring of image while watching sports of fast moving programs such as car / bike races, tv manufacturers came with idea to show each frames at least 120 times in a second resulting in 120Hz refresh rate and the blur was gone.

This was basic, now 120Hz refresh rate is enough, now a days many manufacturer offer rates beyond 240Hz which is not required as our eyes will not be able to distinguish the images from 120Hz and 240Hz so better to go for a TV with 120Hz refresh rate and obviously this will save some of your money also!!!

Now these were the some of the sepcs which one shall look for before making buying decision.

Apart from this important checkpoints are like, does it have HDMI ports, USB plug n play option or not?

Now a days it is necessary to have at least 3 HDMI ports, one for HD Set top box, one for Blu ray player, another HD for gaming console. Base on your need you can go for 2-3 HDMI port TV.

In case of any questions / comments please feel free to comment below.

Stay Tuned! Stay Gadgets Freaky!

You can follow us on twitter   and Facebook for regular new technology updates...