BS in TV Science

Buying a new TV is complicated these days. You have CRT, Flat Screen, Flat Panel, Plasma, LCD, LCoS, DLP, Rear Projection, Front Projection, 16:9 widescreen, 4:3, SDTV, EDTV, HDTV... the choices seem endless. Then you have to decide if you whether buy in a offline, brick and mortar retail store like a Best Buy or Circuit City or you go to pricegrabber.com for full retail price and buy it from the cheapest online store and take a risk at shitty service or at worse, getting scammed. You almost need a science degree to buy a TV these days.

I'm in the market for a new TV. The little 27" SONY we moved out from the bedroom to the living room isn't cutting it anymore. I want something state of the art, big and bad and HD is a must.

So I started my search with plasmas. Thin, cool looking but expensive. Since I'm a PS2/GT4 freak, potential burn-in is a worry. Last thing I want is for Maria to be watching Emeril's cooking show with a picture of a White S2000 imprinted in his forehand. So I then looked at LCD, but the picture quality was questionable on the models that I saw. Then I looked at Samsung's Pedestal DLP TV. Beautiful design, good picture quality. Maria liked it too. Expensive but still within our reach. As I researched this TV more, I was led to avsforum.com where I read some positive and negative reviews. But one complaint caught my attention... video/audio sync problems. It seems that Samsung up-converts any 480i or 480p signal to its native 720p and in doing so causes a lag between audio and video. For a $3,500 TV, this is unacceptable. I briefly looked at JVC's LCoS TV but I'm not too sure about JVC. So I turned back to the good old reliable and bulky CRT. SONY has an incredible 16:9 widescreen HD CRT TV and Best Buy has it on sale for only $1,500 (25% off MSRP).

We're going Friday night to take a look at it and hopefully purchase it. Looks like at the end of the day, CRT wins.