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The single most important feature to look for in a new TV

If you were to read around the internets while shopping for a new HDTV, or even if you go visit an electronics store, you might be under the impression that the most important feature in a TV is the resolution (got to be 1080p), contrast ratio (3,000,000:1), or some other such number. Don’t be fooled, the most important feature is the TV’s size.

Let’s be realistic – we are all on a budget this year. But even before the economic distress only a few of us had the dough to swing the best gear. And since we only have so much money, don’t sell yourself short and pack all the latest features into a TV too small to enjoy.

Set a budget

I’ve written before on how to shop on a budget, so I’ll only briefly touch on this point. Your budget needs to include your whole system, not just your TV. I suggest putting as much into your sound system as you do in your display, but I’ll leave your preferences up to you. (I just think the audio makes as much of an impact as the video, or more!)

Figure out how much you’re going to spend. Cut this amount in half and that’s how much you have for your TV. If you are only upgrading one piece of your system, then ignore this step.

How big should my TV be?

The general rule of thumb says the seating distance should be 1.5x to 2x the size of your screen’s diagonal. This means you should sit about 6-8 feet away from a 50″ display. You can do the math to figure out how big your display should be for your existing seating distance. I sit about 10-11 feet from my 50″ display, and I consider it too small.

This is the rule for home theater. Some people are more comfortable with a smaller display. That is fine. Visit your local retailer and spend a few minutes in front of various sized TVs at your seating distance for an idea of what it will be like at home.

Consider projection TVs

Rear-projection displays are for the most part history. This is because people fell in love with flat panel TVs, even though they’re about the same depth with on their stand anyway. But there are still some projection sets available from Samsung and Mitsubishi. You can also get a front-projection system for much less (per inch) than an equivalent plasma/LCD.

I only offer this as an option because in my situation a 65″ or larger display is appropriate for my seating distance. However plasmas and LCDs in this size are exceedingly expensive. A 70″ LCD is about $15,000. (Although I did see a Sharp 65″ LCD at Costco over the weekend for $3298.)

Now consider the Optima 720p front projector I recently saw at Circuit City which retailed for $999 (liquidation sale takes 20% off now, so it would be closer to $799). You can add a decent screen for a couple hundred dollars and have an 80″ HDTV for about the same price as a 50″ plasma.

You do have to take light situations into consideration with front-projection systems, but most of us do our movie watching at night anyway.

Final step

When you find the size TV you want, you can now look for other features while staying in your budget. Black levels and color accuracy are the most important followed by resolution.

I hope this helps you buy that new TV. Tomorrow is the Super Bowl where I know you’ll all be wishing you had a bigger TV and a better surround sound system to really put you in the action. (Go Cardinals!)

Netflix reaches 700,000 Blu-ray subscribers

Netflix subscribers must opt-in to receive movies or television programs on Blu-ray Disc. This adds $1 per month to your bill. But this hasn’t stopped 700,000 subscribers from choosing to receive Blu-ray through Netflix.

Besides adding three-quarters of a million dollars to the company’s bottom line, CEO Reed Hastings sees this as a good sign for the future of their disc-based business. While they are expending a lot of effort to make Netflix Watch Now streaming ubiquitous in consumer electronics devices, Hastings also sees the adoption of Blu-ray becoming widespread as player prices drop.

Analog shut-off postponed to June 12

Forget everything you’ve heard about the digital switch over! (Well, not everything.)

The US Senate approved a bill yesterday that postponed the shut-off deadline to June 12 instead of the current deadline of February 17. While it still has to pass in the House, we can now expect more commercials and print ads to continue for another four months.

Congress had allocated $1.34 billion for digital converter vouchers and many of them have not been redeemed (who wants to bet they all went to curious parties not intending on using them?). More vouchers will not be issued, but expired vouchers can be replaced for new ones.

While Congress seems well intentioned, electronics manufacturers aren’t too happy about the delay. The February 12, 2009 deadline was set years ago and much of the burden of upgrading customers was carried by the manufacturers. Panasonic said, “no matter what date you set, there are going to be people who are not ready.”

The date has changed, but the technical aspects haven’t. If you have cable or satellite you won’t be affected.


For more information on the digital switchover see our previous articles:
The Digital Switchover
Does your TV support digital broadcasts?
Free digital TV converter boxes

Samsung’s Blu-ray sound bar

Sometimes form beats function. In home entertainment, snobs like me scoff at the thought of compromising sound quality for appearance, but sometimes you have to settle for less. While it would be nice to have floor standing speakers in your living room system, your room (or more likely your domestic partner) sometimes limits what you can use.

If you are in a situation where you want to upgrade from using your TV’s sub par speakers but don’t have the ability to use a full surround system, a sound bar just might work for you. A sound bar attempts to create a simulated surround experience from just one speaker (well, the one speaker has multiple drivers in it wired in different phases and with timing delays, etc). It doesn’t actually work though. But it does sound better than the TV’s speakers!



Samsung will begin selling the HT-BD8200 sound bar solution this Spring that may fit the bill. Not only does it solve the form factor problem, it also has a wireless subwoofer (needs electrical power still), and includes a Blu-ray player. But if that’s not enough, it also includes an iPod dock, and can stream video from Netflix and audio from Pandora.

There is also a WiFi option for this system so you only need power to the sound bar and video to the TV.

Blu-ray sales outpacing expectations

In case you were worried about the success of Blu-ray Disc, there is news you may find pleasing. Adams Media Research has determined that Blu-ray player sales (including the Sony Playstation 3) were three-times greater in 2008 than in 2007. This in spite of the recession.

Blu-ray software is selling at a brisk pace, and accelerating. For the first time, the month of October 2008 saw two-million disc sales. This increased to eight-million in December. Adams estimates 24.09 million discs were sold in 2008, and over 30 million since launch.

Household penetration of Blu-ray players is about 8% after less than three years on shelves. For comparison: Compact Disc had only 4% penetration and Color TV only 3% after the same time span.

The most requested electronics item for high-def owners this past holiday season was a Blu-ray player. HDTV owners prefer Blu-ray to digital download 10-to-1. Even in the midst of the worst economic climate in decades, Blu-ray is a viable technology and will exist for years to come.

Vizio’s internet connected TV

CES is behind us, but I wanted to show you the Vizio TV I told you about previously. The Vizio “Connected HDTV” has a customizable interface for internet content, including Accedo Broadband, Adobe, Amazon, Blockbuster, Flickr, Netflix, Pandora, Rhapsody and Yahoo! service providers.

Coming to retail in Fall 2009, the “Connected HDTV” has the most compelling internet video features of any set shown at CES. It comes with built-in Wireless-N networking, making it a snap to connect to the internet without pulling extra cables in your walls.



The Yahoo! Widget Engine is integrated into the display allowing access to widgets while watching a local source. The widgets are built with Adobe Flash Lite meaning dynamic images and video, as well as easy development for a variety of options. Widgets available now include casual video games, weather, traffic, stock tickers, movie rentals and more.



The remote is unique as it slides open to reveal a full QWERTY keyboard for use with widgets. This is my favorite feature! I’m sure we’ll see more TVs like this.

I’ve never been a fan of Vizio, but it’s nice to see they’re taking the lead on this.

Press Release: Vizio

Images from Gizmodo

Verbatim PhotoSave DVD-R Review

Verbatim USA recently sent us some samples of their new PhotoSave DVD-R’s to test out. So what exactly are “PhotoSave DVD’s”?

The Verbatim website describes the product with “Verbatim’s PhotoSave DVD allows you to quickly backup and archive up to 2,000* photos stored on your PC or digital camera. This recordable DVD searches and stores over 80 different types of photo and video files, protecting your valuable photo memories from hard drive crashes.”

In this article we test out the product to see if it delivers on its promise.

The sample we received was a 3 pack of slim jewel cases, pictured below.

These PhotoSave discs come with a prerecorded zone, which contains the software that performs the automated backup of photo files. If you flip the disc over to look at the recordable side, you will notice that there is a darker ring on the very inner circle of the disc. This dark ring is the prerecorded information on the disc. The photo below highlights this prerecorded area with a red circle.

We inserted the PhotoSave DVD-R into our recordable DVD drive and the software launched automatically. If you have auto-play disabled, you will need to launch the software from the disc yourself.

We used additional software to determine that our PhotoSave DVD-R’s had a Manufacturer ID (MID) of MCC 02RG20. This MID tells us that these discs are genuine 8x DVD-R’s manufactured using Mitsubishi Chemicals Corporation technology. This comes as no surprise to us, as we already know that Mitsubishi Chemicals is the parent company of Verbatim.

The PhotoSave software can automatically detect and backup all JPEG photos on your PC, or you can manually select what files to backup.

Below is the welcome screen that will appear when the software is launched. For this test, we chose the “Auto Copy from: My Pictures” option, which is the default choice. This option states “Automatically scan for photos on your computer, record to this disc and close disc for archiving/viewing/ Note: only jpeg photo files will be recorded.”

As you can see in the screenshot below, the PhotoSave software detected 691 jpeg photos on my test computer, totaling 1.67GB worth of data.

We clicked the Record button to get the process started. The process starts with the Verbatim PhotoSave software adding the photo files that it found to the burning compilation as shown in the screenshot below.

After the PhotoSave software is done adding all files to the burning compilation, the burning process will start. The total length of the burning process will depend upon the total size of the photos that you are backing up and the speed of your DVD burner.

Once the burning process has finished, you will see the completion screen shown below. Clicking on Finish will close out the PhotoSave software.

Summary and Conclusion

Positives:
High Quality 8x MCC DVD-R discs
No software to install
Automated detection of JPEG photos
Simple and easy to use
Backs up all JPEG photos as advertised
Manual option for backing up other file-types
Multi-session options
Backup directly from a digital camera

Negatives:
No option for automatically detecting & backing up non-JPEG file types
Some DVD drives may have trouble reading multi-zone DVD-R discs

All in all, we found that the PhotoSave DVD’s delivered on Verbatims’ promise of providing an easy, hassle free method for backing up photos on a PC. We would not hesitate to recommend this product, especially for less technically inclined users that might need assistance with operating DVD burning and backup software.

You can pick up a 5 pack of the Verbatim PhotoSave DVD-R for $16.37 here.