


If you mostly fly solo or cozy up to your partner for an evening's video entertainment directly in front of the TV, either technology will work fine. If you often host a large gathering around the electronic hearth, or you often watch from off-centersay, from the kitchen while cookingplasma is a better bet with its much wider viewing angle. Will it normally be a large or small group watching? This problem is even worse during the day if there's a window or glass door directly opposite the screen.
SIZEWISE GLASSDOR TV
(Samsung LCDs are one exception with shiny screens.) So if you watch the TV with lots of room light, you can often see yourself and other objects reflected in a plasma screen, especially during dark scenes. Plasmas have a shiny, reflective screen, while many LCDs have a matte screen that does not reflect room light nearly as much. However, if you watch during the day without good black-out shades or you need to leave the lights on, LCD is often the better choice. If you have good control of ambient light in the room, or you watch mostly at night and can dim or turn off the room lights, either type of flat panel will work just fine, and as I said earlier, I prefer the look of plasma in this case. On the other hand, LCD TVs exhibit much less image retention than plasmas. Just to be perfectly clear, LED backlighting with local dimming, which is used in the SIM2 HDR47 seen here, and high refresh rates with frame interpolation are designed to address problems that plasmas do not suffer from in the first place. Many people hate the way this looks, but I can easily tolerate it in favor of less motion blur. (Frame interpolation is also called motion estimation/motion compensation, or MEMC.) On the downside, it can also introduce an artifact called the "soap-opera effect," which makes movies look like they were shot on video. If you tend to play games and/or watch sports or other fast-motion material and you decide on an LCD, get one that refreshes the screen 120 or 240 times per second (120Hz or 240Hz) instead of the conventional 60Hz, which suffers from "motion blur." When this higher refresh rate is combined with frame interpolationnew frames are generated by the TV to fill in the gaps between actual frames, as shown abovethey can significantly sharpen onscreen motion.
