TV Education

Types of Televisions:

Direct View: Projects an image directly on the TV's Screen

Flat Panel Plasma/LCD

Flat panel TV's offer modern, sleek designs (generally less than 5" thick), they are wall mountable with wide viewing angles, high contrast, and very good brightness.

Plasma:   Screen sizes range from 37"-100"  they are wall mountable, have excellent viewing angles (180 degree) and have a very good contrast ratio. Plasma tv's have a glass screen that absorbs most of the ambient light but, will show a glare depending on the lighting and/or windows in a room.  Keep that in mind when choosing a tv to fit your needs. I.E.  If you have a room that has a lot of ambient light in the day and you do most of your tv watching at night in that room, then a plasma is fine.  If you cannot control the lighting or glare in that room and you do watch tv during the day then you might want to consider an LCD flat panel.

Plasma tv's contain Phospors, and the only downfall of a plasma tv's is that there is a potential for burn-in. Burn-in is when there is a ghosting of an image burned into the screen that is caused by a static image for a long period of time.  Now, don't be afraid this is no secret, it is a nature of the technology and a lot of manufacturers have designed ways to prevent this from occuring.  They only way this can happen is if the tv is paused for a long period of time (typically a video game), or if an image on a channel that you are watching is static for a long peroid of time ( i.e bloomberg channel).  However the colors and image reproduction of a plasma tv is unbeleivable. 

Most plasma tv's and lcd tv's have up to a 60,000 hour lifespan (12 hours/Day for 13 years).

LCD:   Screen sizes range from 13"-65" they are wall mountable, typically less than 5" in depth.  They have excellent viewing angles as well (180 degrees).  An LCD tv would be a better solution if you have a room with a lot of light or glare that would affect the viewing.  LCD tv's also are a better choice if you plan on doing any gaming and have to have a flat panel tv.  They will never burn in because of the liquid crystal display technology. They are not necessarily considered to be better than plasma's that is often a misconseption.  They are designed differently for different applications. 

Projection TV's

Projects an image onto the television's screen. There are three different technologies used to project images: DLP (Digital Light Processing), LCD (Liquid Crystal Display), and LCoS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon)

These technologies are offered in both front projection and rear projection displays.

Viewing Distances

26"-32" minimum viewing distance is 3'-4' and maximum is approx 6.5'-8.5'

42"-52" minumum viewing distance is 5'-6' and maximim is approx 10.5'-12.5'

62" and Up minimum viewing distance is 6' + the maximum is approx 15.5' +