LCD Or Plasma, Which Do You Buy For Your Flat Screen TV?

It would appear that latest and most prestigious in house fashion accessory for the home is the Flat Screen TV. The decision has to be what sort of Flat Screen TV to get? Of the many choices it really boils down to two really, Plasma or Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) for your Flat Screen TV?

It seems a lot more than a mere 80 years since television moved beyond being a mere 'electromechanical information system' to the broadcast medium that we know it to be today from humble black and white now through to the latest in multi colour Liquid Crystal Display /Flat Screen TV sets. Perhaps it is a rather sad indictment on our times to find that when asked about essential items, quite a few people will list their TV set.

Much like the conventional approach to driving a car and our understanding of how the Internal Combustion Engine works (or not depending on your point of view) very few people understand entirely what happens behind the screen of a TV or do they? From a grammatical derivation originating in a mixture of Greek ('tele' meaning far') and Latin ('visual' meaning 'sight') the word television roughly translates as meaning 'far sight'.

Understandably if you were to ask the average man in the street his biggest issue with television today most would reply that the one problem they have is an increasing dependency on technological terms and an increasing ignorance of what these terms actually mean.

Now would be a good idea to concentrate purely on the digital aspect of television, its latest developments formats and bandwidth issues in use and exactly what all this technical jargon and terminology actually mean.

So what exactly is Digital TV?

This is one of those areas where by and large ignorance rules and the wrong terms get used with amazing regularity such as LCD and Plasma both meaning the same thing when in fact they are similar yet different technologies.

In a nutshell Flat Screen TV's can either be Liquid Crystal Display (LCD) sets or can be Plasma screen but the two are different.One of the major differences between the two technologies probably lies in the fact that with LCD TV's because the main technology used is TFT (Thin Film Transistor) by and large the screens are able to be much more energy efficient and potentially much smaller and more mobile.

Whereas traditional analogue technology and television was reliant upon transmission of its pictures and sound files via analogue channels newer digital television handles all of its broadcasting and transmission via digital signals which are much smaller, use up less bandwidth and are more accurate.

So what do all of the terms surrounding Digital TV mean? Let us use one of the newer LCD TV's available to help us as we detail what exactly this all means.

The LCD TV that we shall use for our illustrative purposes here is the B&O Beovision 7-40.

It is essential that we are familiar with the following key items of information.

Firstly we have to understand the phrase Screen Resolution and all of that implies. Here we refer to the exact number of pixels that can be displayed in each dimension.

Whether the TV is Hi-Definition Ready would be the next thing to look at. By Hi Definition Ready we mean that is the TV is ready and suitable to take advantage of the latest Hi Definition TV pictures that more and more programmes are being broadcast in.

We would need to look next at what types of connectors are used to connect the various peripherals that go to make the entire Digital Package work.

In this case we mean SCART Plugs and sockets and their usage. SCART stands for 'Syndicat francais des Constructeurs d'Appareils Radio et Television (SCART).

Lastly on the technical side we would need to look at what types and what numbers of High-Definition Multimedia Interfaces (HDMI) are being used. The High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is a licensable audio/video connector interface for transmitting uncompressed digital streams between digital audio/video sources such as set-top box, HD DVD Player etc.

The Beovision 7-40 is a 40in LCD TV and the prices for these would be in the region of 7470 pounds sterling or 15000 US dollars. The resolution of the screen is 1366 X 768 and with regards to being HD Ready the answer is yes. The Beovision has 3 (3 RGB) scarts and the type and number of Multimedia interfaces the Beovision 7-40 uses is DVI and 1. The type of Tuner for this TV is Analogue and Digital and the Beovision is available from specialised outlets only.

So how would we rate the B&O Beovision 7-40?

The most obvious place to start with as far as TV's are concerned would be the picture quality and our score here would be 10, next we would look at the sound quality and our view of this would be 10. Another useful aspect to review is the availability and number of relevant connections and our score here would be 8. With regards to the overall level of features, our view would be 8 if we then take a look at the ease of use and overall value for money then our scores would be, 6 and 6 respectively.

Finally our overall opinion would be the performance of this TV it has to be said is pretty fantastic but a similar performance can be had for a fraction of the price and therefore giving much greater value for money if you know where to look elsewhere.

With regards to the prices in this article we have tried in all cases to take an average across the industry from a number of well known web sites and so we ask you to bear this in mind and treat these prices as advisory only rather than absolutes.

Stephen Morgan writes quite regularly on the Internet about TV and Home Entertainment issues and more on the above can be found at sony flat screen tv and also at http://bestflatscreentv.biz