What Is The Future Of TV?
I remember our huge 40 inch CRT TV we had in the front room, I thought that was as good as TVs could be, even though the back stuck out a few feet! Then plasma TVs started to emerge and suddenly you could hang your TV on the wall, which compared to the old CRT units was like magic. LCD televisions were the next onto the market, and they started to draw people away from plasma TVs that suffered with screen burn, then HDTV sprang up, so what is next on the horizon?
A recent development has been the use of LEDs for the backlighting of an LCD TV, previously they used CCFLs (cold cathode fluorescent lamps) which are bulky compared to LEDs. There are two versions you can get, one where the LEDs are at the edge and the light is guided into the middle, or the better version where the LEDs are all across the back of the screen, either way you get a super slim screen compared to the CCFL versions.
Just starting to emerge now are the 3DTVs, although that technology is still in its infancy so the reaction has not been that good at the moment. The concept of 3D television is excellent, and I have seen firsthand how powerful 3D movies can be, but at the moment you have to wear funny glasses that make it less usable. The ‘active shutter’ glasses currently being used give you a strange flickering effect you have to look through, and reports suggest the 3D effect doesn’t work when you sit more than a few feet away from the TV.
Remember these are the first generation of 3DTVs though, so the people who like to have the newest toys will buy these models, then the rest of us will wait for them to improve the technology and buy the later versions of them. There are one or two companies working on commercial applications of 3D viewing without having to wear glasses, so hopefully that will filter down into our TVs soon.
OLEDs (organic light emitting diodes) are something to watch out for, but at the moment they are stuck with screens no bigger than about 13 inches in size. They are still trying to make the technology work for larger screens, but if they can make it work then expect screens mere millimeters thick to grace our walls in years to come! So you can see the future of TV is going to be interesting, I can’t wait to see what it will be like in 5 years time…
If you want a huge 55 inch LCD TV while you wait for 3D TV to take off, then consider the Samsung UN55B6000 which is really popular at the moment.
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