Xigga

Before I went to Wal-Mart I had never even heard of that name. I stepped foot inside Wal-Mart after 3 years, because it opened up close to my house and they obviously had lower prices for some things. So I walked into the electronics section, as I always do when I go to any store. I was like “Vizio, what the hell is that?” I thought it was some cheap brand that will die out in a couple months.

I was wrong! They would’ve died if it wasn’t for Wal-Mart. When Vizio picked Wal-Mart to be their retailer, they had a reason. Wal-Mart has the biggest market. They get tens of millions of customers each day. Vizio has been gaining speed fast. They are catching up to Samsung and Sony for the biggest LCD TV manufacturer. But Vizio still has some more to go with quality. They are priced lower because they have slighly lower quality. They’re not horrible though. If you want to see horrible take a look at any American brand TV (RCA, Polaroid, etc). Vizio is American, but it’s good. It just needs to keep getting better.

Vizio has become a threat to other retailers. BestBuy is selling their private label Insignia HDTVs in direct competition to Vizio. Goto BestBuy.com and search for Vizio. You will get a nice little notice that says “we do not carry Vizios, but we do carry Insignias”. I saw several Vizio’s at Costco the other day and they looked as good as the Sonys (Samsung still the best!).

If you’re looking for a cheap HDTV, so you don’t have to worry about buying a new one (because it was cheap), go with Vizio. It is good for a secondary HDTV somewhere in the house. If someone breaks it, no biggie. I’d like to know what Vizio has planned for the future. My guess is that they are working on a QuadHD panel, or one of the bigger players will give Vizio the contract to manufacture the panel for them.  I’m thinking Sony, they always contract stuff out to the little guys.

There quite a lot of ruckus going on with Quad HD. More and more people are hearing about it and they are going crazy! Everyone’s wondering when Quad HD is going to come out. One site (don’t remember which one) said that it will debut in 2015, which is too far in the future. It’s about 7 years from now. All the major manufacturers have developed prototypes and some are even selling it right now for a hefty price. Westinghouse is selling a 46″ and a 52″ QuadHDTV to businesses who need them, like research labs and businesses that require highly detail 3D modeling to do analysis.

Samsung has created an 82″ prototype also. Wonder how much that sells for? My estimate is that QuadHDTVs will be available to the masses in 2011-2012. That’s a much better estimate. The current 1080p sets have matured and there are only a few kinks that need to be fixed. LCD prices are dropping 15% (average) every year. This past year it has been around 20%-25% with Vizio undercutting the market. Vizio has a huge market and is catching up to Samsung and Sony. Sony will fall shortly, if they don’t drop their prices. Vizios are sold in Wal-Mart, BJ’s, Sam’s Club, and Costo.

QuadHD’s will run at about $4,000 for a 52″. Technology is moving at a fast rate. 1080p has only been around for 2-3 years and they are already prototyping and selling 2160p TVs. In 4-5 years they are bound to hit the market.

Don’t let your HDTV go to waste.  Use it as a monitor.  You can hook up any laptop or PC to your HDTV.  HDTV’s are better monitors than the specially designed monitors for the PCs.  You get higher contrast ratios and a bigger screen!  You can play your videos games, or watch movies.

Your laptop/PC will either have a VGA or DVI connection.  Newer PC/laptops have DVI, older ones (2+ years old) will most likely have VGA.  HDTVs older than 2 years had DVI, but they dropped it and now only have VGA.  DVI was dropped because of HDMI.  Hi-end laptops and PCs will have HDMI, in that case you just need to get the a HDMI cable.  If you HDTV has VGA and you laptop/PC has DVI, then you should’ve been given a DVI-VGA adapter.  If not, then you can find it cheap online.  It’s also possible that your TV has VGA and your laptop/PC has DVI.  You use the same adapter!

Watching movies on the PC is the best thing because they can play any format.  Some of you may have Windows XP Media Center Edition.  You can tell by going to Start > All Programs > Accessories > Media Center.  Just start that up and you have a nice little media center.  You PC may also have a SP/DIF or optical audio connection.  You can hook that up to your receiver and get 7.1/5.1 surround sound.

No need to burn DVDs or CDs anymore.  Hardrives are very cheap these days.  You can get drives that are $0.20 per gigabyte.  Just search around on the Internet.  You’ll find very good prices, and if you’re not in one of those “weird” states, you won’t have to pay taxes.

You can also play HD movies on your computer if it can handle it.  Bluray drives cost about $350-$500 for your computer.  Put one in and you got yourself a Bluray player.  You need a dual-core system to play Bluray movies.

Within a few years HTPC (Home Theater PC) will be the new thing.  It’s puts everything into a nice little box.  But HTPCs don’t have special “technology” to make it better for your HDTV than your current computer.  If your computer has SP/DIF or optical out, then you are good to go.  A decent video card would make it better because HDTVs are 1920×1080 @ 60hz.  The new HDTVs are 1920×1080 @ 120hz, so if you want to get the best of the best, get a good video card that can handle that resolution.

FED stands for Field Emission Display.  It’s very similar to SED technology, except FEDs use diamond crystals in the panels.  First, we are using gold to gold plate all the contacts on electronic equipment, like cables, memory cards, PC cards, etc.  It’s only a tiny bit of gold per component, but there are millions of components out there and I’m surprised we haven’t ran out of gold.

And now they want to use diamonds for TVs?  That’s going increase the prices of diamonds like crazy.  On this planet you’ve got two kinds of people, (1) those who want to wear diamonds, and (2) those who want to grind the diamonds to dust and stick them in a glass panel to watch high quality TV.  I prefer to be in the latter group.  I don’t care much for diamonds.  They look like a piece of glass, and you can’t tell much of a difference between a real diamond and a fake diamond.  Diamonds have great physical qualities, but you can’t do justice to them by just wearing them.  So I’m all up for putting diamonds in TVs.

The sad thing is that one company, called Candescent Technologies, tried to develop the FED technology to use another material for the panel instead of using diamonds.  They failed, but not because of what they were doing, it was because so much money was being put into LCDs that FED could not develop in time and they ran out of money.  FED is still being developed.  We could expect it in 2010 or later because LCD has too much support and investment.  Sony tried to join Candescent’s bandwagon, but didn’t want to fully commit to it.  Candescent filed for Bankruptcy in June 2004 (four years from today).  The company’s remaining assets and patents were sold to Canon for about $10.75 million.  Let’s see what Canon does with it.

As I was totally unaware of FED technoglogy, I had to do some research one it and I’m still read about it to understand how it works and if it will ever be a reality.  Stay tuned…

There’s an easy way to get your local channels free in HD. Just get a HDTV antenna. Instead of paying $5-$10 extra per month to get local channels, just invest in a HDTV antenna. The HDTV antenna isn’t for everyone. If you are too far away from the broadcasting station, you will have trouble picking up some or all the channels.

I like the Terk HDTVi VHF/UHF HDTV Indoor Antenna. It’s cheap and it’s good. But it’s up to you, you can read the reviews and decide for yourself. You can also look at the other antennas they have. If it doesn’t work then you can return it. The antennas are mainly good if you are in a city, since that is where most broadcasting stations are. Spending $20-$40 on an antenna is better than paying your satellite/cable company for it. The charge you at least $5/mo. for local channels.

This was a short article. I just wanted to get it out because not a lot of people know of this option. Enjoy your sports in HD!

SED stands for Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display. Pretty long name, so lets just call it SED. SED technology is going to compete with LCD and OLED technologies. Plasma has no chance, read my previous article to see why. SED was created jointly by Canon and Toshiba.

LCD is good, but you don’t get a high contrast ratio (yet). Even though we have Samsung out with a 500,000:1 conrast ratio, it’s not static. It’s dynamic contrast ratio. Read my article on contrast ratio here. High contrast ratio will be the biggest advantage for SED TVs. To find out why we first need to know how LCDs work.

LCD TVs have pixels that are arranged in a nice grid. Each pixel can be any color, but the pixel doesn’t have it’s own light source to control the brightness of the color. Behind the grid panel, there is a light source called the back light. When LCDs first came out the backlight was a powerful tubelight. Now they have LEDs for the backlight, but it’s still one light source for all the pixels. So the pixels can only have a small contrast range. If one side of the screen is all white and the other side is black, the black side will look washed out, because the backlight is at it’s full brightness.

Before I explain SED technology I need to explain CRT. CRT is the old picture tube technology that has been around for more than half a century. CRT stands for Cathode Ray Tube. CRT works by shooting an electron at a phosphorus screen with an electron gun. When the electron is shot at the screen it goes through a mask which allows the electron to hit only specific locations on the screen. when the electron hits the screen, it light’s that section up. The electron gun shoots electrons one by one in an orderly fashion. It starts from the left of the screen and goes all the way to the right, then it moves down to the next line and repeats the process until the whole frame is drawn. This happens very fast, so you don’t notice it at all.

SED brings the best of both worlds together. In a SED TV each pixel is like a small CRT television. Each pixel has an electron gun and it shoots straight. In a conventional CRT, the electron gun shoots an electron, but since it has to draw on the whole screen the electron is deflected with a magnet at whatever angle it needs to be to hit the exact point on the screen. With SED you only need to shoot straight because you are using a grid of CRTs to display a picture. So in a SED TV, we have a grid of pixels, but the pixels are tiny CRT’s. This gives us the benefit of a higher refresh rate, because CRTs are fast at changing colors. LCDs are slow compared to CRTs. If you play videos games you will notice a ghosting effect in fast moving scenes. You can also notice this in movies with fast-motion scenes.

With SED we also get higher contrast ratios because each pixel will have it’s own brightness. When an electron hits a phosphorus screen it emits light. And the light can be any color you wish and brightness. So SEDs don’t have a backlight, they don’t need one. An electron hitting a phosphor creates light! Simple put, an SED is like a LCD, but each pixel is a tiny CRT.

You may think that we are moving backwards because CRT is old, but that’s not the case. CRT had some limitations, such as a maximum screen size it could shoot the electrons on. You can only change the electron’s trajectory so much. That’s why you never saw a 60″ CRT.

Will SED make LCD obsolete? It’s possible, but LCD is always being improved. Let’s not forget Sony and how they like to push their technologies. When VHS was coming out they were pushing their Betamax, they lost. For the HD media they were pushing Bluray, and they won. Sony is going to be pushing OLED technology against SED. OLED is similar to SED, but instead of having tiny CRTs for pixels, it uses (Organic) LEDs. That’s all I can say about OLED for now. I’ll leave that for another article.

It’s quite clear that plasma is loosing it’s ground to LCD. I never thought plasma TVs had any chance to begin with. The first flat-panel TV I saw was a Pioneer plasma at BestBuy. It looked nice, but cost $13,000! There weren’t any LCDs there. After a year, it was down to about $9,000, if I remember correctly. This is when LCD TVs started coming out. Currently plasmas are cheaper than LCDs, but there’s a reason. They aren’t as good as LCDs. Let’s do a comparison.

Advantages

Cost - Today you can find plasmas a lot cheaper than a LCD for the same size. Cost is important because you’re paying for it.

Size - You can get plasma’s larger than 52″ for a good price. There are only a couple LCDs out that are larger than 52″. One is the Samsung LNT5781Fwhich is 57″, and the other is a Sony KDL-70XBR3, which is 70″. But it seems like Sony will stop making those. Buy the 70″ as fast as you can because it’s only $32,999.00. Or you can buy a car, your loss.

Disadvantages

Heat - Plasmas create a lot of heat, more than CRTs. More heat means more wear, which shortens the life of the parts. It’s the same thing with computers. If you don’t ventilate them, they will run 5-10 degrees celcius higher and it will shorten the lifespan. The current half-life rating of plasmas is around 60,000 hours. Compared to 20,000 a couple years back. They accomplished it by shifting the pixels over a certain interval. This is unnoticeable to the eye because it’s a minor shift. It shifts about 1-3 pixels in a single direction. This reduces the time each pixel stays active.

Burn In - Burn in is common to plasmas, CRTs, and LCDs. But plasmas are easily affected. If the image doesn’t change on the screen for 30 minutes or more, then it will burn in to the screen. The brighter the image, the stronger (easily noticeable) the burn in. LCDs take longer to burn in, even then it’s hard to notice. You can easily see a burn in if you display a solid light-gray image.

Power Consumption - Plasmas use as much power as CRTs, and some times more. The power consumption for plasmas is around 200-240 watts. CRTs are in about the same range. LCDs usually range in 130-175 watts. It depends on the size of the TV. The new LED LCDs use less power.

Fragile - Plasma screens have a glass panel. You have to be careful because it can crack and cause the gas to escape. No gas means no TV. LCDs have a plastic material screen, and plastic can absorbe stress and return back to it’s shape. Some older LCDs had a protective glass layer, but if it cracked your TV would still work.

Conclusion

The biggest concerns are heat and power consumption. Heat and power consumption go together. The more power it uses, the more heat you get. Within a couple years plasmas will cease to exist. LCDs evolved faster, and overcame it’s drawbacks faster than the plasma technology. If you want a cheap TV and don’t mind upgrading in 5 years, you can go for it. Don’t get comfortable with LCD either, there are two technologies that are emerging, SED and OLED. Stay tuned…

Contrast ratio is the difference between the darkness and brightness (lightness). If you see an HDTV with a contrast ratio of 5,000:1, that means it can display 5,000 distinctive shades of gray, and that includes black and white.

So is higher contrast ratio better? It depends on what type it is. Manufacturers are now advertising Dynamic Contrast Ratio, which is not the actual contrast ratio of the panel. The panel’s contrast ratio might be 1,000:1. DCR adjusts each frame with some sort of algorithm to produce an image that is comparable to the frame if it was shown on a panel that had a 5,000:1 static contrast ratio. (By “panel” I mean LCD or Plasma screen).

How noticeable is it? Not very, because your eyes would need to see a DCR and a SDR panel side-by-side and a pitch-black room to notice it. Even then it depends on how sensitve your eyes are. To give you a quick lesson on physics (or biology), your eye’s perception of how bright an object is relative to other objects in the room. Let’s say you are in a room with the walls being completely black. You also have an omni-directional light source. You have several objects in the room which are different shades of gray. The lightest shade of gray will look white in that room. Now let’s paint the walls to super-white. Now that light-gray object will look gray to you because your eyes can only determine the brightness of an object relatively.

Also, if you are watching TV in a room which has a light source, which will most likely be the case unless you have a dedicated home theater room, it will be even harder to notice the difference in contrast ratios. Even in the dark, if you have light colored walls, some of the light will reflect back on to the TV screen. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t ignore contrast ratios when buying a HDTV. They are important, but make sure you find out what the static contrast ratio is. You should look up the TV specs online and most of the time the manufacturer will have it listed on the website. Majority of the time it will be in the product spec sheet, which is usually in PDF format.

It’s not very easy to determine which TV will look better based on the DCR’s given. One TV maybe 10,000:1 and the other maybe 15,000:1, but it still depends on how well the second TV processes the frame. You should go down to your local retailer and have a look at the TVs. I haven’t been able to figure out what the actual algorithm for adjusting a frame with DCR is. My first thought was that it takes a frame and processes it to find how many shades it has. If it’s larger than the static contrast ratio of the panel, it “levels” the frame by shifting the brighness values down for each pixel. So if a frame’s darkest pixel is 500, it will set that pixel’s brightness to 0, and knock down the brightness of the other pixels accordingly. But it isn’t as simple as that. The only thing I was able to find about it is that it uses an algorithm called Iris, based on the eye’s iris, but that still doesn’t explain it. I have some further research to do…

You’re at the store looking to buy a HDMI, A/V, or Component cables. You see some that are $10, $20, $30…but then you see one that is $120. You are thinking WTF?! You start reading the package and it talks about how much quality you get with it and how it’s nitrogen injected to keep the naughty electromagnetic interference out. You decide to ask a salesperson just to make sure, and he says “Yeah, you’ll get the best quality with that”. So which one do you buy?

A. $10 cable
B. $20 cable
C. $30 cable
D. $120 Monster Cable

If you answered D, you are an idiot! The correct answers were A, B, or C. When we’re dealing with short lengths of cables almost any cable will do. Except for those cheap $2 ones that are very thin and have cheap connectors. Most setups at home require a 6ft. (2m) cable. A short cable will not easily pick up interference, which is good. It’s only when you’re going at about 100ft. or more that you need higher quality cables. Even then I would not think of buying a Monster Cable. They are overly priced. If you want to buy good cables, go for Belkin or another brand with satisfied customers. If you don’t know if a brand is good, check online. Check customer reviews on consumer electronics sites.

You can go and ask your Physics professor. He will tell you that it doesn’t make a big difference. You don’t need a super conducive material to get electricity to flow. Electricity flows through almost any metal. It’s only when you get up to 1000ft. or more that you think about material’s conductivity. And if you were running a cable that long, you could just increase the voltage. Of course, your audio video devices don’t have a voltage setting you can change. I was just giving you a scenario.

Electricity moves at the speed of light, so you have nothing to worry about with your 50ft setups. If you have any questions, comments, or just want to argue, feel free to post.