Flat-panel TV brings 1st-class luxury to home
Cost runs from $1,000 to $9,000. The new TVs dress up the room.
By HEATHER NEWMAN
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
It's a statement of power and grace in any living room: a large flat-panel television, slim and sharp as a knife when viewed from the side, a glowing expanse of glass and silver and color from the front.
They're expensive toys, ranging from around $1,000 for the smallest plasma televisions to $9,000 for the unbelievably gorgeous Philips model I invited into my living room to test recently.
But they can have an impact on your room and your lifestyle that's comparable to the finest piece of furniture or even an expensive room remodel.
Flat-panel TVs can free up feet of space in a room, because the flat panel replaces the traditionally huge picture tube in a standard television. The difference gives you the appearance of having added on to a room without pulling out a sledgehammer.
But don't think that a smaller footprint equals less impact. Flat-panel televisions in plasma and LCD varieties have a visual weight that far exceeds their front-to-back dimensions.
Think of them as a large picture window on one wall and you're close to the feeling. In fact, a flat-panel television can be an excellent solution for a room that's lacking in openness, especially if you pop in a DVD with nature scenes or a family picture slide show.
Size matters
My family quickly found out how dominant a large flat-panel TV can be when the Philips showed up for testing.
Top to bottom, it wasn't any larger than our modest standard-picture-tube television. But because it was in widescreen format, and because there was a stylish expanse of glass and metal around the actual picture, it was the focus of the entire room immediately.
In a large room, it can hold its own amid giant pieces of furniture and soaring architectural details. In a small one, it turns nearly any arrangement into a home theater, inviting you to plop down and glue yourself to the screen at the exclusion of everything else.
That's something to consider when you're designing a home; it's actually a fairly inexpensive way to create a home theater in a small room without investing a lot in fancy theater seating or accessories.
The impact of a flat-panel TV is like that of a large, detailed piece of art rather than a clunky piece of ugly furniture, as so many traditional big-screen TVs appear to be.
And though you'll pay the fine-art price to get one, you might just find that incorporating it into your home is a way to add first-class luxury without making major structural changes.
Commonly available flat panel televisions come in two types: plasma and LCD. Plasma TVs are the most common flat-panel monitors available and tend to be much less expensive, though no flat panel TV is cheap.
They display black better than most LCD televisions but suffer from one major drawback: burn in. If you don't watch everything in wide-screen, or if you watch channels that have repetitive items on screen -- a stock ticker, or a bright station ID logo for instance -- those items can burn into the screen over time, like a bank ATM monitor, showing a ghost when you're watching other programming.
Test model
I tested a 42-inch plasma monitor a year or so ago and watched standard television in the usual 4:3 ratio (the squarish size of most televisions) on the wide screen. By the time a month was up, the two gray bars on either side of the TV picture had begun to burn in.
LCD televisions don't suffer from that problem. They can be pixel-y, looking digitized, if the resolution isn't crisp enough, and they're much, much more expensive. Most people are familiar with LCD monitors because they've seen small ones used with computers. Larger television-size models are just beginning to penetrate the market.
The 42-inch widescreen Philips Electronics LCD Ambilight FlatTV (42PF9996, list price $8,999) I tested is brand new, one of the company's fall LCD television releases.
It had many features that weren't available on previous LCD models, and those helped enhance the experience immensely.
Most flat-panel monitors don't come with tuners, the processor necessary to handle over-the-air broadcasts.
This one did, and it had very respectable speakers, dual inputs for picture-in-picture, a wide variety of plugs that might make a separate amplifier unnecessary for some folks with a small range of DVD players and other equipment, and a unique backlighting system that washed the wall behind the TV with light to provide the perfect contrast for the picture on screen.
I especially liked the backlighting. It let us watch without any other lights on, yet kept us from feeling eyestrain. It was a lovely halo around the television that enhanced what was already a heavenly viewing experience.