Insurance woes

[Andrew MacLean]

Plasma, LED, CRT HD ready tv. anyone got any idea how a poor fool is to navigate the range of options?

Andrew

[GarethB]

I rely on my brother for help in the electrical maze.

My good lady did agree that at least I would not be wasting money on Sky+ and HD Plasma TV's.

Just need to finely balance the extra hours work are asking me to do with home life. Spent more on the car this year than the preveous two together! Purchased whole cars for far less.

[jayuk]

Well...just remember the new Sky HD and any HD based service is going to be over hyped and expensive without any reason!.......however the picture quality is better...but I assure you that its not as good as what everyone thinks!....and as much as the hype is!..if you got a good Plasma, itll more than suffice...

[John Smith]

Plasma, LED, CRT HD ready tv. anyone got any idea how a poor fool is to navigate the range of options?

Well, it's all about pixels.

If you hold a magnifying glass to a CRT screen, you'll see the dots. It's possible to have LOTS of dots on a CRT, but because electrons don't come in different colours, CRTs work using a shadow mask, different colour phosphor dots and VERY accurate alignment. The problem with CRTs come with size and age. The larger and older they are, the more difficult to keep everything looking good. CRTs though are great. They have a viewing angle of almost 180 degrees.

Plasma technology is like CRTs insofar as having lots of different colour phosphors, but each one is illuminated by it's own electronics. This makes it very accurate and stable. Like CRTs, the viewing angle is excellent. They can be made very large without too much trouble - 50 inch screens are not uncommon nowadays. They are very bright too, and that's their downfall. The phosphor dots literally burn away during use, and a non-moving picture can leave visible burn patterns in the screen. Very high quality, but high cost, and they're a bit fragile.

LCD TVs are the new kid on the block. They work with a white light, and lots of LCD crystals with coloured filters. So again, we have effectively red, green and blue pixels, each one being illuminated by causing the LCD to "open" like a shutter. Viewing angle isn't so good, as the light source is behind the screen rather than being on the front. These are mid-priced and getting on for plasma quality. Poorer models though can suffer if the crystals take too long to change state. Good ones can be almost as good as a plasma at half the price. It is alleged that a picture can be burnt into an LCD display, but the effect is much lower than CRTs or Plasmas.

Basically, you pay your money and make your choice.

[Michael P]

My preference is plasma over LCD for a viewing experience but more care is definitely needed.
I have a Panasonic which I believe has a good record with regard to screen burn providing reasonable care is taken. Apparantly it is very important to "run" the tv in for the first 200 hours by keeping the brightness and contrast settings low.
One concern used to be the red dot on Sky but that problem has been addressed as it can now be removed after 30 seconds.
I definitely won't be getting an HD ready tv because I think the improvement in picture will be lost on me, but I will check it out though.

[John Smith]

For HD, you need to be careful.

The "HD ready" logo means that you can CONNECT an HD source (Sky HD box etc) to it. To actually see better pictures, your screen needs to have sufficient pixels.

Talking in the vertical axis only, traditional analogue TV uses 625 lines, but only 576 of these carry a picture, the remainder are for teletext and other internal bits.

Current UK digital TV therefore only transmits the 576 lines of picture. In the USA, they have 480 lines of picture, this is why the majority of LCD and plasma screens only have 480 pixels vertically. No use to anyone in the UK, really as you'll get a degraded picture on everything you watch!

Now, with HD, we make the jump from 576 lines to 1080. Many other countries' HD use 768 lines and a faster refresh, so yet again it is the rare display which will be good enough to give you the benefit of the HD picture you'll end up paying £10 a month for.

Caveat emptor!

[Michael P]

John, I am not sure I understand you ( all a bit too technical for me).
Are you saying one could buy an HD ready tv and it would not necessarily provide an HD picture even with say a sky HD box

[John Smith]

Pretty much, yes.

You could get a "better" picture than standard-resolution, but not good enough for the full HD glory.

In my case, my plasma has 1024 lines of resolution. Much better than standard 576, but insufficient for Sky HD's 1080.

[Michael P]

I see.
Aldi have an HD ready plasma on offer for £999.99 (42") which is cheap but then you are not getting the full deal as this only has 1024x768 resolution.
Surely this is misleading advertising as it is only partially HD ready. How is the average person in the steet supposed to realise they are not getting what they actually want

[Michael P]

Anyway back to Gareth, I am sorry to hear that you are still suffering.
Make sure you include an item for this in your claim for uninsured losses.