The truth about all the technical mumbo-jumbo

If your in the market for a new tv then your sure to be hit with some of these technical terms and figures. Some are important and others value is overstated in my mind. 1. You'll hear a lot about resolution or the amount of scan lines used to make up the picture you watch. Keep in mind these figures are based on the total capability of your set and not neccessarily how good the actual picture is. It's like saying the odometer goes up to 150 mph. But in reality no one really drives that fast. Yes the resolution of broadcast equipment has come a long way but still you will have a wide variation in actual picture quality. For instance if "I love Lucy" comes on even thought it is being broadcast digitally, the program is not in high definition. At this point most HD signals coming from tv stations are based on 720 lines of resolution. I guarantee you if you take a set with 1080 specs and one with 720 specs and just show the picture very few if any would really be able to tell you which set is which. And after all at some point how clear is clear. You eyes can only see an image so good, beyond that you would have to have robotic eyes to distinguish the different. 2. 60hz, 120hz 240hz. In the lcd,led technology pixelating or freezing of images in motion is common. You can tell that simply by the fact they keep coming out with sets with higher numbers. Plasma on the other hands doesn't have that problem because it uses a phosphor screen like your old crt tv. Those sets also run at 600hz. Most people in the know prefer plasma simply for that reason. 3. Probably the most laughable spec is the contrast ration. First of all there is no uniform way of measuring it and second, the contrast ratio will very from program to program depending upon what you watch. I guarantee you if you take a set home and watch it in the store mode or demo mode, you will soon develop a serious headache. Those setting are designed to catch your attention from far away and not intended to watch on a daily basis. I hope some of this information is helpful, because more times than not the sales person at the store doesn't know much more about the sets than you do. They only know what they've learned thru the compaies e-learning courses.