How to buy ... a LCD Television

The image quality available from LCD televisions has come ahead in leaps and bounds in the past couple of years and there’s no denying that a flat panel LCD TV would look great in your living room.

By PC World Staff / Monday, September 04 2006

The image quality available from LCD televisions has come ahead in leaps and bounds in the past couple of years and there’s no denying that a flat panel LCD TV would look great in your living room. LCDs offer high resolution and their low screen glare makes them perfect for brightly lit rooms. They’re lightweight for easy wall mounting, power consumption is low, there is no risk of screen burn in like there is with plasma TVs and they come in sizes smaller than 40-inches. On the downside, contrast can be poor, motion lag can show up on lesser models and they are still prohibitively expensive at sizes over 45-inches.

The Big Picture
Naturally the one thing that should be at the top of anyone’s checklist when shopping for a TV is image quality. If image quality is average or poor you’ll soon start to notice it and you’ll keep on noticing it long after the “wow factor” of buying a flat panel TV has worn off. Unlike “old fashioned” CRT (Cathode Ray Tube) televisions where even a cheapie sported reasonable contrast levels and decent picture quality, shortcomings in a flat panel world are harder to overlook. Of course, a “cheap” LCD panel costs exponentially more than a cheap CRT of a similar size, so any problems with the set will hurt even more, given your level of financial investment. Similarly any problems with an LCD display will be increased as you go up in screen size. Here’s a list of qualities to look for in an LCD display, and some of the pitfalls you should avoid.

Key features and shopping tips
Resolution: LCD panels are made up of thousands of tiny dots called pixels and resolution is expressed by quoting the number of vertical pixels followed by the number of horizontal pixels, for instance: 1366x768. Just like a computer monitor, the higher the resolution, the sharper and more detailed the image. This resolution becomes ever more important as the introduction of high definition content draws closer. Current standard definition DVDs sport a resolution of 720x576, high-def formats increase this to 1280x720 or 1920x1080 — commonly referred to as 720p and 1080p. Resolution is an easy one to check as all manufacturers list the native resolution of their panels in the specifications. Most large LCD TVs over 26-inches or so have horizontal resolutions in excess of the 720 lines required to be called high definition capable but even so, always check.

Colour: Colour reproduction is hard to judge on the shop floor. To help you judge displays in a shop, take a copy of your favourite DVD, one you know well, and get the salesperson to play it for you. Check to see if the colours look natural and watch for overly saturated reds. Insist the salesperson lets you adjust the display settings to see for yourself what the colour response is like. Chances are if you can’t get it to look right in store you won’t be able to at home either. Don’t rely on comparing TVs from the movie or Sky Sport feed that’s playing as you walk into a store. Video splitters and other low-rent ways of sharing a picture round mean that if a TV’s display looks bad, it’s probably just getting the rawest input deal.

Contrast/Black levels: Contrast is the measure of the whitest white to the deepest black and helps give the image depth. It’s represented as a ratio such as 3,000:1 meaning the lightest part of the image is 3,000 times brighter than the darkest. Sadly there are numerous ways of measuring contrast, making it hard to compare contrast levels based on the supplied specifications alone; we advise using them as a rough guide only. It’s traditionally an area LCD displays have lagged behind plasma due to the inability of LCD to completely cut off all light from getting through. This means that instead of dark areas of the picture looking black they will look grey or blue. We’ve seen nice black levels in some recent high-end LCD displays, but even the best of these is no match for a good plasma. Should this put you off buying an LCD? We don’t think so, as it really only becomes noticeable when watching in dark or low light viewing conditions.

Uneven backlighting: A backlight is responsible for producing all the emitted light in an LCD display. It can be a cause for concern if it shines through the liquid crystal unevenly. Find a completely black scene on a DVD and you’ll soon see what we’re on about - you’ll see patches of light and dark where the light is coming through unevenly. All LCDs will suffer to some extent, but like contrast it’s only a problem when viewing in low light conditions. Even so, it’s worth checking for because it can be a distracting problem.

Response time: This is a term used to refer to the speed with which the individual pixels in an LCD display can switch on and off. If they can’t do this fast enough you’ll see blurring or motion lag during fast paced action scenes, it’s easy to detect and incredibly distracting, so avoid a display showing signs of the problem. Most manufacturers offer response times for their displays measured in milliseconds. A display with an 8ms response time means it takes that amount of time for the individual pixels to turn on and off again. Like contrast ratios these measurements should not be taken as an absolute number — there’s more than one way of measuring response time, which makes comparing apples with apples difficult.

Other considerations
Besides image quality there are other things worth considering: Ease of use is an important factor we often forget about. Is it the TV easy to operate? Are the menus fast and intuitive and do the channels change quickly enough for you? Also check the on-board speakers for overall volume along with bass and treble response. Will it be mounted on a wall or table top stand? Does it have all the necessary connection options, including analogue component, and the digital connections you'll need for high-def images DVI and/or HDMI? And lastly, is the remote control any good? You will, after all, be using this little device almost every day.