LCD vs LED vs Plasma??

Flat Screen Television In Nanaimo

After 25+ years of faithful service our old 25" RCA television finally decided it had enough and was time to retire. It let us know of it's intent by becoming temperamental when  we would try to turn it on. Sometimes it would start first time and other times it would take many attempts. I'm sure that if service people actually fixed stuff anymore for less than the cost of a new one, it would still be filling our needs.

However, that is not the case, so the quest for a new television began. Being a bit of a tech guy I knew there were some differences to be considered in the LCD/LED/Plasma market. I knew that Plasma was known for being a power hungry beast that had deeper blacks and was capable of keeping up with fast action on the screen due to it's faster refresh rate. LCD on the other hand did not refresh as quickly and apparently did not give the same depth of color as the Plasma but did offer considerable power savings. Then of course the newest kid on the block in the LED TV which supposedly offered a clear bright picture with power savings better than the LCD.

I did my product research on the Internet which truly is a fantastic source for unbiased varied opinions on technology, brand reliability, pricing and the best place to make your purchase. It is no surprise to find out that over 50% of Canadian consumers will research a product or service online first, before making a buying decision.

I had determined that the size of the room we would be viewing the set in was small enough that a 32" screen would be ample for our needs, so a 6 foot wide monster was out of the question. I also realized that while there may be different brand names on the front of the product there was a good chance a lot of the insides came from the same plant in Asia somewhere.

With all my research complete I checked pricing around town on the Internet and discovered the main competitors in town were basically within a few dollars of each other if you could compare product with product. With the wide variety of name brand and minor feature differences actual comparison online was not as easy as you might think. The only way to finally decide was to visit the local showrooms and see for myself what each set had to offer.

When looking at identical size televisions it seemed a bit of a toss up between the LED and LCD when it came to picture quality, however it also became obvious there was a difference in picture quality between some brands. After narrowing down my choices to a 32" LED and a LCD of the same size I hailed a salesperson to get their opinion on my choice.

The young fellow I spoke with was very personable and knowledgeable and immediately made it clear that in the size range I was looking at many of the pros and cons of LCD and LED would have little bearing on how pleased I would be with the products performance in my own living room. Refresh rates, power consumption etc. pretty much became moot points and in my case the best bang for my buck was in the form of a 32" Toshiba LCD for one cent less than $300. The salesman said I should expect at least 5 years service from my purchase and most likely more. While pricing has certainly come down in recent years I doubt dollar for dollar it will come anywhere near matching the performance of my faithful old RCA CRT.

Then of course there was the really painful part when it came time to checking out my $300 purchase in the form of the $31.75 BC 'fee' and the blessed HST for another $39.81, meaning before getting out the door my $300 television was now costing $371.55.

The fee and tax added 24% to the total cost of that fancy new idiot box which is likely more than what the store made from my purchase. I have never had anyone explain to me what value a tax ADDS to a product??

I immediately discovered something after setting up our new television, even a 32", state of the art LCD television can do nothing to improve the quality of the offerings of the million channel universe.