Cheap Plasma TVs

Unfair or not, one of the most familiar matrimonial stereotypes of the communication age is the on-going battle between he who wants wires, and she who does not. It is a curious state of affairs, as women, in general, watch just as much television as men, yet the cliché would indicate that they are not willing to put up with the mess of black cables that having a HDTV, digi box, DVD player and/or games console tend to require in the corner of your lounge.

One way of hiding this unsightly menagerie is a tasteful entertainment cabinet or some other piece of similar shaped furniture that has learnt to improvise, but some screens are just MASSIVE, and buying nice new furniture to hide your tech toys can double the cost of the whole enterprise, and you could get an even bigger TV for that. So, some cause for celebration this week then, as Eminent announced the iTrio kit for wireless HDTV.

The iTrio consists of a sender unit, which can hide in the cupboard with all your other gizmos and bits of electric string, and a receiver, which plugs in to your TV. This arrangement means all you need to see is the TV and receiver box, with the DVD, digi box and console all hidden from view, beaming their magic pictures to the TV via the sender unit. The system supports full 1080p resolution, meaning it is future proofed and a perfect complimentary purchase for the many cheap plasma TVs currently on offer. It also features two HDMI ports so you can connect your PS3 along with your digi box rather than having to keep swapping cables.

So next time you’re under pressure to invest in expensive furniture just to hide the cables of your new cheap LG TV, think of iTrio.

But it appears television manufacturers LG are also jumping on the “size zero” bandwagon, with the release of their new “skinny frame” range. The overall size of LCD TVs is nothing compared to the chunky boxes that cluttered your living areas in the old days of cathode ray tubes, but LG believe that there is still work to be done in the area of space efficiency, and have thus released two new TVs featuring a mere 25mm of frame around the outer edge of the screen.

LG LCD TVs

There is no doubting the clean, clear lines of the new LG LCD TVs, but whether the new look is worthy of an upgrade in its own right is debatable. As yet, the two screens, 50 and 60 inches respectively, are only available in Korea anyway, and with so many great deals available on a similarly sized LG 42 LCD TV you are probably better off shopping around for an older model if in the market for a new screen right now. It is an interesting glimpse of a super-thin future though, perhaps when LCD screen, DVR and satellite decoder will be combined in to a single, slender pane on the wall.

“High Definition” (often abbreviated to “High-Def” or just “HD”) is a name given to TV screens and monitors that can display a picture above a certain resolution. A screen’s resolution is simply how many pixels, or coloured dots, it can display in a set area at any one time, with the higher a resolution resulting in a cleaner, crisper picture. Simple eh? Not quite. At present to be classed as a “high definition” screen, the device only needs to display 720 pixels along the screen’s vertical axis (known as “720p”) whereas other HD screens display up to 1080 pixels (1080p). The greater pixel density means 1080p screens can produce a clearer, crisper picture than 720p screens, but still both types are labelled as HD. This means when buying Samsung LCD TVs or LG LCD TVs that claim to be HD, it is important to make sure you know what you are getting. That is not to say that a 720p screen will not be significantly crisper than your old TV, but it won’t be as nice as a 1080p screen, and so should be priced accordingly.

There are other factors can affect the quality of your picture such as the quality of your broadcaster’s signal and the wiring or connectors used to transport that signal around your house, but we will cover those topics in a later blog.