Are you thinking of buying a new, even bigger, even better TV this Christmas? I’ll confess to a rudimentary understanding of the terminology of this corner of the consumer electronics jungle but the real question you should be asking rather than 1080p, LED/LCD, or 3D is what’s right for your room, and your eyes. That’s why I thought you may enjoy this short but educational piece from The Economist that explains all of this.
The problem with viewing images on a television screen—especially the “progressively scanned” 1080p HDTV sets in use today—is that most people sit too far back. At the typical distance of nine feet, a 1080p HDTV set (with a screen 1,920 pixels wide and 1,080 pixels high) needs to be at least 69 inches across (measured diagonally) if viewers are to see all the detail it offers. To see all the detail on a 32-inch set with 1080p resolution means sitting a little over four feet from the screen—great for video-gaming on your own, but hardly conducive to communal viewing
The devil really is in the details.
