An Overview of TV Types

With the amount of TV technologies competing for space in everyone’s living room, it pays to know what’s out there before finding yourself lost in a labyrinth of makes and models. Here are a few of the popular models you’ll find in any TV showroom.

Direct-View TVs – or CRT Tube TVs are the traditional “big box” television. They are generally available in sizes between nine to forty inches.

Advantages of Direct-View TVs include: excellent image quality, affordable prices and perfect viewing angle. Since Direct-View TVs have been around much longer than its flat panel brethren, they have the advantage of decades of research and development resulting in higher image quality relative to cost.

Disadvantages include: limited sizes, heavy weight, and significant depth. The push for flat screen TVs was a response to the large and often unwieldy Direct View TVs. With advances in LCD TV and projection TV technologies, manufacturers were able to produce TV sets that were lighter, slimmer and capable of scaling to much larger viewing sizes.

Rear-Projection TVs – Rear projection refers to a type of TV whose image is produced by projection an image from behind the screen.

CRT Rear-Projection is the oldest of the rear projection technologies and comes in sizes between 42-73 inches. Its advantages include: excellent image quality, rich black levels (how “black” an image appears on the screen).

Disadvantages include: large size, weight and poor viewing angle. CRT Rear-Projection TV sets are notoriously heavy and deep, some ranging over two feet in depth. They also have a smaller viewing angle (120-140 degrees) when compared to Direct-View TVs.

LCD Rear-Projection TVs come in sizes between 42-70 inches. Its advantages include: ultra sharp image and no rainbow effect as is the case with DLP projection TVs. LCDs generally have inferior black levels when compared to CRT projection TVs. Large pixel gap makes up close viewing feel blocky.

DLP Rear-Projection TVs come in sizes between 42-67 inches. They have better black levels and smoother pictures with a smaller pixel gap than LCDs. Though their picture quality is generally better than LCD Rear-Projection TVs, DLPs are not perfect since they do suffer from video noise which appears as sparkles in darker areas of the screen.

Flat Panel TVs – are TVs with a slim “panel” build. Flat Panel TVs come in two varieties: LCD and Plasma.

Plasma Flat Panels come in sizes ranging from 32-76 inches with some manufacturers producing Plasma TVs as large as 100". Plasmas generally have better black levels than LCD displays. They also come in larger sizes yielding a better value per inch in the 45"+ range.

Although it has been greatly reduced in newer models, Plasma TVs still suffer from burn in, images getting burnt into the screen permanently after staying on one image for too long.

LCD Flat Panels generally range between 10-45inches in diagonal screen length. LCDs, unlike Plasmas, don’t suffer from burn in and they’re display, especially with high quality LCD TV manufacturers such as Sharp, are top notch. However, since large sized LCD TVs are expensive to produce, 45"+ sizes are more expensive than Plasmas TVs of the same size. LCD TVs also have a smaller viewing angle than Plasma TVs.