ELECTRONICS

Know your current technologies! If you don’t care just scroll below for tips, you lazy bastard.

Cables

• HDMI (Copper digital cable for A/V)
• FIBER (Fiberglass/glass digital cable for data)
• CAT7 (Copper Digital cable for data /alarms)
• DVI (Copper digital cable for Video)
• COAX (Copper analog cable for A/V)

Technologies

• DTV (480p)
• HDTV (720p-1080p)
• LCD TV (An array of liquid crystals that change color as current is applied on a grid)
• Rear Projection TV (A miniature projector shoots an image backwards to a screen from inside the TV showing a stright picture.
• Plasma TV (A negative-pressure space filled with gas that arcs across an element to the screen to produce different colors.
• Progressive scan (60 lines of resolution shows at every 1/60th of a second)
• Interlaced scan (30 lines of resolution shown every 1/60th of a second.)

Types of TVs

LCD TVs

Look for artifact, color blemishes on the screen. Look for dead pixels, and check the date when it was manufactured. You shouldn’t pay any more than $200 for a 32″ and no more than 900 for a 50″. It has a vibrant image, high resolution, and compatibility with PCs.

Rear Projection TVs

While a show is playing, walk to the left and right angle of the tv and see how much the picture fades. If it fades too much, it doesn’t have a good “Wide Viewing Angle”. This is indicative of an old TV. Also gauge the view from above and below. Your living room needs to have space for the back end of the TV too, as they are about 2-3 feet thick. The price for a big TV may be attractive ($400-$500 for a 52″) but it is probably old and the bulbs need replacement. Look up how much a bulb costs on Ebay before you buy it.

Plasma TVs.

Avoid all plasma TVs made before 2007. The old TVs started to go fuzzy after about a year or two when the ‘bulb elements’ lost their ‘charge’. The newer lineup of TVs are designed to work a lot longer, and are cheaper than and LCD. Their picture is more vibrant that an Rear Projection TV, but in the end they are just a bulb of fragile glass that wiimotes can penetrate easily without protection.
I’ll continue my electronics stuff another time.