Posted on: Tuesday, June 24, 2003
From LCD to plasma, choices abound in TVs
By May Wong
Associated Press
EAST PALO ALTO, Calif. — At the Good Guys store, a wall gleams with more than two dozen flat-panel televisions, hanging like video canvases in a museum. Gary Dixon ogles them, then walks out with a sigh. Despite jaw-dropping declines in price, the flat-screen TVs are too high for his salary as a sheet metal worker.
Down the street at Best Buy, Lynn Ooi is vexed: HDTV or not? Widescreen or not? Nearby, Paulo Puga plays with a flat-screen TV.
"HDTV? What's that?" asks the father of four, his back turned from a row of high-definition TVs and flashy plasma monitors.
Watch out, consumers — it's a TV jungle out there.
Not since the first commercial cathode ray tube TV was developed seven decades ago has there been so much choice in televisions.
Size is no longer the key feature. Display types vary among projection and direct-view sets. There are flat-screen and flat-panel models, squarish or rectangular screens, high-definition or standard-definition, digital or analog.
You could spend $80 on Casio's 2.3-inch handheld liquid crystal display or $21,000 for Mitsubishi's state-of-the-art, 82-inch widescreen.
Even though only a smattering of digital programming is available, digital televisions eventually will become the norm.
Big-name makers such as Sony have scaled back or stopped making non-digital TV sets.
That's primarily because analog commercial TV broadcasts are scheduled to stop as of January 2007 under a federal mandate, though the deadline could get delayed, as it has been several times.
Digital TV prices nevertheless are dropping dramatically, and the list of programs broadcast digitally in high definition continues to grow every day.
When the complete changeover occurs, all programs will be transmitted digitally, with greater clarity. Conventional analog TVs will still work, but won't give viewers true digital pictures and audio.
Digital televisions make up less than 10 percent of the roughly 30 million televisions sold each year in the United States, but they shame the analog set by removing on-screen ghosts, snow and static.
High-definition televisions offer today's sharpest picture. An HDTV image can have more than 1 million pixels. That resolution is about 10 times greater resolution than analog TV and standard-definition digital TV.
Although plasma TVs have the trendy buzz, the less costly LCD displays will satisfy plenty who seek HDTV quality, said Michael Heiss, an industry consultant in Los Angeles.
For the budget-conscious, big-screen rear-projection models deliver the best value today if you enjoy watching DVD movies and can afford the floor space, he said.
