There has never been a better time to replace your hefty, ugly and energy-hungry old CRT Television that you've had for years, because the market for flat-panel LCD Television displays is bulging with enticing offers at incredible prices, so much so that it can be hard to identify which television is right for you. Addtions Direct catalogue has a fantastic range of LCD televisions with the added bonus of being able to buy now but pay in April 2010. This brief guide will hopefully help you choose your new LCD television, explaining the benefits of various models and the differences between brands, as well as the difference between the two flat-panel technologies available, LCD and Plasma Televisions.
Models, Sizes and Brands
LCD Television come in so many varieties offered by different manufacturers that you'll easily find
one to suit your needs. The range in size between 15" right up to 46", and most modern displays are
made in the widescreen format in order to display digital television and DVDs in their native aspect
ratio of 16:9. This means the days of the black bars of your old 4:3 television are gone. Getting a
Television of a size that fits in with your proposed viewing room is important, as massive screens
can dominate a smaller space. In terms of branding, all the big players have their own ranges, with
Sony, LG, Samsung, Toshiba and Philips to name a few, and you will pay more for the larger displays
which have the ability to display richer colours with more tonal variety. However, there are some
lesser known brands which make budget LCD Televisions which actually use the same LCD panel technology
as the big branded rivals, but packaged in a different shell and sold at a lower price, so cheap price
does not necessarily denote worse quality.
High Definition
Getting a HD-ready LCD Television is simple, though you should take into account the various HD
resolutions that different LCD panels will offer. The smaller sizes of TV will only be able to
display 480p or 720p, the lower of the HD standards, but none the less far more detailed and crisp
than older CRT displays. 1080p, or 'True HD', is the highest available HD resolution, but is only
available on the largest, most expensive LCD television.
Built In Freeview
Soon it will only be possible to receive digitally broadcast television signals as the limited old
analogue systems are being taken off-air nationwide by 2012, with some areas already experiencing
digital-only broadcasts. The benefits of Freeview, the subscription free digital service which is
available through your existing aerial, have been embraced by LCD Television manufacturers as many
models come with built in Freeview decoding boxes which allows you to simply plug in your aerial and
get instant access to over 40 free interactive digital channels.
LCD vs. Plasma Displays
- LCD stands for Liquid Crystal Display, and works on the principle of shining a fluorescent backlight through thousands of tiny LCD pixels (the dots which make up the picture you see), whose colour and tone are determined by an electrical current and in combination form the image which you view on screen
- Plasma displays function by sandwiching xenon and neon gasses (the 'plasma' of the name) between two layers of glass within thousands of miniscule compartments, all in front of a series of red, blue and green phosphorescing lights. When an electrical current is applied in variations to the gas chambers, which act as pixels within the display, UV light is emitted which is then expressed as colour by the phosphors, creating the on-screen image. As a result, Plasma displays can be much larger, but subsequently a lot heavier than LCD displays, which is something to think about if you're considering hanging your TV on a wall.
