Some stores are bursting with expensive television sets you’ll be sorry you bought in a year’s time. Probably less.

Did you buy a big screen television set 18 months ago? If you did, there is a disturbingly high probability that you (a) paid too much, or (b) bought something obsolescent, or (c) both.
     Well, that’s often true of high tech, isn’t it? What if you had bought a computer back then? Or even an MP3 music player? If you wait until prices drop and the latest technology comes out you’ll be waiting forever, because those two events never happen simultaneously. What is rather more disturbing is that many stores are filled with television sets that no videophile should buy. Don’t expect the sales “associate” of a big box store to tell you this.
     Granted, the term “videophile” covers substantially less than the entire population of the earth. On the other hand, only a videophile would spend thousands of dollars on a big screen TV. To the majority of the population a 27” (68.5 cm) TV is a big-screen TV. And when most people watch “video” (as opposed to a sitcom) they hook up their two-head VCR to the antenna terminals of the TV. We’re going to assume that you are looking for a bigger screen (81 cm up...perhaps way up), to be used not only for broadcast TV but also for VHS, DVD, and perhaps even HDTV. If that is so, then most of the large screen TV’s in the store are really bad buys. In some stores all of them are, and you may need to visit a specialized full-service video store. That should come as little surprise, since of course the same is true when you are looking for high end audio gear.
     First, an aside for readers living in countries other than ours. For convenience, we will be discussing specifications that pertain to the NTSC system used in Canada, the US, Japan, and a few other places. It is not as good as either PAL or SECAM (some wags claim the initials NTSC stand for “Never Twice the Same Color”), but because it is the norm in the countries that initiate most video standards, new products often come out in NTSC first. Among the differences are that PAL and SECAM pictures are made up of 625 lines instead of 525 (those numbers include the blank lines between frames), and that there are 50 frames of 25 images per second rather than 60 frames of 30 images in NTSC. US readers who are not used to the metric system can convert centimeter measurements to inches by dividing by 2.54...or, more roughly, adding a zero and dividing by four.
     What TV sets should you avoid?
     1) Analog sets. Astonishingly enough, you can buy a big screen projection TV costing thousands of dollars which is simply a bigger version of a set you could have bought 15 years ago. These sets are locked in to the inferior standard of interlaced NTSC images. Those images may have looked all right when the TV was a small glowing rectangle on the other side of the room, but a room-filling version is nearly unwatchable. Indeed, a glance around the wall of TV’s in a big box store reveals the truth: the best image is on the compact sets, whose screens are too small to let you see the gross imperfections of the images. The problem with those sets is that there is nothing you can plug into one to make it look any better. And there never will be.
     The presence of modern video connectors, such as S-Video or Component Video, does not necessarily indicate a non-analog set. The words you should look for are “HDTV-ready.” Yes, you should look for that even if you figure HDTV is headed over the dam (and in that you’re not alone), because that is the only sort of set that can utilize a full-quality signal from digital sources. And digital sources will become more and more important over the next half decade, whether HDTV goes mainstream or not.
     Don’t settle for a set that is “480p capable.” That is a digital TV all right, but with most of the functionality designed out. It won’t handle even 780p, a progressive image format sometimes referred to as “enhanced TV.”
     2) Sets with 4:3 proportion screens. Yes, widescreen films can be viewed on a conventional screen in letterbox fashion, but there is an overwhelmingly persuasive reason not to get one. It will compromise both DVD and broadcast TV. Let’s see why that is so.
     Let’s look at a typical 91 cm screen with the usual 4:3 aspect ratio. That “91 cm” is a weasly corner-to-corner measurement. In North America it will be advertised as a 36-inch screen -- a common size for direct-view sets.

      Of course the diagonal measurement is not all that useful (beyond making the screen seem bigger than it really is), so let’s figure the horizontal and vertical measurements. Thanks to Pythagoras and his theorem on right-angled triangles (z2 = x2 + y2), we can figure out that the screen is 55 cm high and 73 cm wide (rounded off to the nearest centimeter). Multiply the two figures together, and you get the screen area: 4015 cm2.
     The area is important because, no matter what the proportions of the screen you are paying for that screen area. If some of is unused, you’re paying for it anyway.
     Of course none of it will be unused when you are watching a TV broadcast or a typical pan-and-scan videocassette on that 91 cm set. The screen looks just like the one above. Since the picture has the same proportions as the screen, all of the 4015 cm2 screen surface is used.
     But now let’s look at a typical widescreen movie, which is to say, pretty much any movie made in the last quarter century. It looks like this on the same screen:

     This is the famous letterbox effect, familiar to anyone who watches DVD’s of films made in the past three decades. The widescreen picture occupies a 41 cm by 73 cm area, which is just 75% of your expensive screen real estate. So notice what’s happening: a picture which is supposed to be larger than ordinary is being reproduced 75% smaller than the “narrow” image. Worse yet, a high resolution widescreen progressive scan DVD will be reproduced smaller than a low resolution off-air broadcast. How’s that for lousy allocation of resources!
     Look at these illustrations, and it’s easy to see what needs to be done. Lop the unused surface from the top and bottom of the screen, and graft it onto the sides. That’s in effect what you do when you choose a 16:9 set. Imagine a set that is 84.5 cm wide and 47.5 cm wide. It has the same surface area as the 4:3 set, but it can give a lot more of its surface to the widescreen DVD or digital broadcast. All of it, in fact.

     A 4:3 off-air television picture will be smaller on that set, but that’s fine, because chances are that image will have far lower resolution anyway, and you won’t want to enlarge it too much.

     Some widescreen sets come with a couple of insane variants for displaying 4:3 images. You can fill the screen, cutting off the tops of people’s heads.

     Stupid though this is, there’s dumber than dumb: stretching the TV image anamorphically, to fill the wide screen:

     Conclusion: unless you’re buying an extra set for the kitchen or workshop, don’t buy a 4:3 set, no matter how attractive the price. This isn’t something that will be obsolete next year, it was obsolete last year.
     3. Sets without progressive scan inputs. You already know why this is important (if your DVD player doesn’t have a progressive scan output, your next one will), but don’t be fooled. It costs virtually nothing to add a component input to a TV set, and it doesn’t cost much more to have a $16,000/year big box store “associate” tell you it has a progressive scan input. Check for yourself. This is not the same thing as a component input.
     4. Sets without vertical compression. A 16:9 set will almost certainly have this, because the wide screen is useless without it. This lets a widescreen image occupy the entire vertical dimension, and stretches it anamorphically to fill the screen. Most DVD players can take advantage of such a set, at least with DVD’s that are marked “enhanced for wide screens.”
     5. Big sets without line doublers. You might think this is superfluous, since a progressive scan DVD won’t let you see the scan lines anyhow. In fact this is really important, because you’ll probably be using the set for other sources, such as VHS and of course broadcast TV. Unless the set will be placed in a huge room, you’ll be sitting close enough that the pattern of scan lines will be disturbing. A line doubler won’t add detail, any more than oversampling can add detail to a CD, but it will make the line pattern much less obvious. A big screen without line doubling is nearly useless.
     At the same time, not all line doublers are equal, as a demo will quickly reveal. Some eliminate so much detail that, instead of distinct horizontal lines, there are visible square blocks making up the image. Some TV manufacturers, interestingly enough, are buying their line doubler chips from the company that made line doubling (and quadrupling!) famous, namely Faroudja. But don’t let a brand name take the place of checking performance for yourself. This should of course be done with an off-air broadcast, not with a DVD which -- if everything is set up optimally -- won’t use the internal line doubler.
     6. Sets with no image adjustments. Remember when a TV set would have half a dozen knobs for adjusting the contrast, brightness and color temperature of the picture? The couch potatoes found that a bit much to cope with, and so the adjustments were taken over by microchips. Those chips were not designed to give you the most accurate picture, but to produce a picture with lots of “punch” that will stand out even when the set is placed in one of those big walls of TV’s that big box stores are so fond of. Better sets today allow you to choose among different pre-programmed settings, including a “movie” setting that may provide a less contrasty picture with a longer tonal scale.
     Still, a long tonal scale doesn’t mean an accurate tonal scale. On a properly adjusted TV set, an object of a given color should be the same color whether it is brightly lit or in the shadows. If you have an expensive TV set, it may be worth your while to get it aligned by a video professional. If you won’t be doing that, you’ll want some means of doing basic adjustments without taking the back off the set. What adjustments are available? The instruction manual may tell you, though salespeople in all but true high end stores probably won’t have much of a clue.
     How do you find your way through those dozens of hundreds of sets against the wall? Eliminate the obvious ones. Anything without a wide screen, any set that is not explicitly HDTV-ready. That may eliminate 98% of the candidates (or even 100%, in which case you’re in the wrong store). You can then compare the sets that are left against our list. Modern sets may be expensive, but one of those will last you for a while. As for obsolete sets, they’re not exactly giving those away either.

About the pictures: The man at the lectern in the images above is Mario Labbé, president of Analekta, at a recent launch of his company’s records. The “Venice” scene is actually of The Venetian, a casino/hotel in Las Vegas.

(This is a full article from issue No. 63 of UHF Magazine. To read the entire issue, just order issue 63 at our secure server.)

Complete articles from this issue:
Soundproofing, Big Screen TV's to Stay Away From, Passion A11, State of the Art

Excerpted articles from this issue:
Comparing the Incomparable: Listening in the Store, Antique Sound Lab Leyla, Vecteur Espace, Two Interconnects, Five Speaker Cables, Four Power Cords