Choosing an HDTV Set

Video Transcript

Hi, I'm Brad Bear on behalf of Expert Village. In this clip, I want to talk about choosing the right high definition television. You go to the store and there are a lot of options. They're all different shapes and sizes and one may look just slightly better than the other but may cost a fortune, but its smaller than the other one. Well, lets look at really what is important in choosing a high def set. First, room size, the size of the room that you're going to put the high def set into makes a huge difference on how you're going to really enjoy your viewing experience. You don't want to put a 60 inch TV, a high def set, in a 10x10 foot room. That's just overkill, that's too much. Each TV has, or each TV size, and ask the sells person about this, has an optimum viewing distance. Where you want to put your couch or your chair that you're going to be watching from, you want to consider that. See if you have the proper distance, as well as the rest of the decor and the layout of the room. So, look at the room size to first determine kind of what area you want to be in for size. This one right here is a 32 inch. And that's a great size. This is what I have in my living room at home. Forty-two inch would fit in that room as well, but in terms of price, I stuck with the 32 inch. Now the other options, or the other things to consider, once you figure out what size you want to be in, now you've got to figure out how much money you have to spend. High def sets go from anywhere from $350 up to like $5000 for the gigantic ones, and actually some of the smaller ones are very expensive as well. So, when you figure out your size, look at your budget. A 32 inch high def set is usually in the neighborhood of about $1000. You can get them between $700 and $1500. So that goes into brand name and also a few other little bells and whistles to look at, whether or not it has a built-in tuner, which we'll talk about a little bit later. Or, if it's just a stand alone set that requires a box top kind of cable decoder to be able to accept signals. So, budget is another consideration to look at. The other thing, the third and main thing, to look at would be what you're going to be using it for mostly. Are you going to be watching television mostly on it? Or are you going to be watching movies mostly or is it a good mix. Television is still broadcasting or mostly broadcasting in 720 lines of resolution for their HD feeds. So, that means you don't need a 1080i set to watch television if you're going to be primarily be watching television on that set. So, that may bring your cost down and actually it would also bring your size down. If you're going to be watching mostly movies if its for a theater, a home theater, you want to look more towards the larger size and the 1080i sets. Those are the ones that have the 1,080 lines of resolution versus the 720 lines of resolution. So again, 720 lines of resolution is great for television watching, it's also great for movies because most movies are brought out in 1080i. Or at least at the 1080 screen size. So, it could be down converted to 720 very, very well. If you plan on using just a standard definition DVD player, I would suggest getting a smaller set because the image won't be blown up as large and its not going to pixelate and kind of fall apart and look kind of garbage. You really want to consider some of your other options for watching DVDs on a high def set rather than just the standard definition DVD player that you may have already. But we'll talk about that in another chapter.

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