Gadgetory

buying a TV is an awful lot like buying a car sometimes you've got to learn all these different tech terms that you then don't need to care about for another five or seven years until you're buying another one I'm Brian Cooley here at Best Buy trying to make it simple here's how to figure out types of TVs okay first of all LED LCD TVs are the new mainstream these are extremely popular it's like the LCD TV you probably have today but with LEDs as the light source behind the picture instead of fluorescent tubes as we used in the past the benefits here are a very thin TV that can have better performance in terms of illumination of the picture and also lower energy consumption that said the fact that these have taken over makes us a little sad because they're pushing out our favorite which is plasma plasma TVs have been around since the dawn of this HD flat-panel era in fact CNET's favorite TV over and over again tends to be a plasma even right now the downsides to them are they aren't terribly thin they don't like to be used at really high altitudes or in extremely bright rooms and you're not gonna wow your friends with some new technology when you bring one of these home but get over it it's what our editors spend their own money on almost every time and you get an outstanding picture for a great value by the way plain old LCD TVs are pretty much non-existent right now they've all become LED LCDs you may find a few models still being sold they're not bad televisions they're just not the latest television now let's get to the latest the avant-garde televisions beginning with 4k or ultra HDTV this is a television that has twice the number of lines of resolution counted from top to bottom and therefore four times the number of pixels as today's best high def TVs it's an amazing amount of detail what they do is bring you so much more finest of each pixel that it's almost impossible to see them but we're finding it's not that impressive in actual use because 4k pushes to and actually beyond the limit of what your I can discern also 4k TVs to do what they really do well need native 4k content in which there's almost none right now and lastly 4k is best on a really big TV above 65 inches at that point you're pushing up against a different spec the saf or spouse approval factor if you can get past that and get a really huge one you might see the benefit now OLED technology is what we're really excited about it stands for organic light-emitting diode or only lawyers executives and doctors because nobody else can afford them right now these TVs will come down in price in a few years when they do they will bring with them the holy grail which is that they can show black perfectly when you get black on the screen right all the colors around it really pop they're more saturated and more natural additionally OLED TVs are incredibly thin down to a third of an inch and can use very little power it's the first TV you may buy from the side as opposed to the front you'll gasp when you see one 3d TV is still out there but it's a feature in high-end televisions not so much a different kind of television bear that in mind it's not really going anywhere because there are right now about 800 3d blu-ray discs on all of Amazon compare that to 25,000 streaming titles on Netflix and yet we complain that that's nothing to watch so a lack of contents an issue so are the glasses and recently even ESPN decided to cancel their 3d sports channel role that altogether and 3d is something that would be nice to have but think of it as just an augmentation of a high-end 2d HDTV finally HDMI cables I have three words about these by basic ones you can spend 10 bucks on an HDMI cable or 300 and I will tell you this the picture will be the same we're in the digital era now where the digits that make up video either at the TV or they don't this isn't like the old analog days where a better cable or fussing with your antenna would give you a little better picture it's either there or it's not so don't go nuts buying HDMI cables get a good basic brand and be good with it now notice I didn't clobber you with a lot of specs like refresh rate contrast ratio and subfield pixel drive that's because we find you can read every speck on the box and still not know if a TVs good or not that's where we come in at our C net labs we use expensive instruments and very experienced odds to tell you which ones have a great picture regardless of specs and which ones maybe don't so much find all those reviews at c-- Netcom