The transforming digital living room

We’re in the midst of the biggest transformation of living room entertainment since the radio console replaced the family sing-along.  What’s more remarkable is how many changes we’re seeing -- all at once -- in the way home entertainment is conveyed, played and displayed.  In short, if you haven’t lately strolled through your local consumer electronics emporium, then you have some catching up to do.  But in the end, you’re going to end up with a private entertainment pavilion that would dwarf the dreams of 18^th century royalty.

In the living room it all begins with the image. Larger screens are the inevitable result of the move to high definition television, and the old-fashioned cathode ray tube is being lost in the transition: as screen widths go up, those old glass tubes get awfully large.  But if you don’t mind their size and weight, cathode ray tubes still provide superb and cost effective HDTV in fairly large screen sizes, as in the 34 inch Toshiba Cinema Series HD 34HF84.

Go much beyond that size and you’re looking at plasma, LCD and projection sets.  Plasma screens are an excellent and well-established technology with great black levels (a key element in picture quality) and wide viewing angles; Panasonic’s units, such as the 42” HD TH-42PX25U/P get consistently good reviews. And prices are rapidly dropping, due to both production over-capacity and overblown fears about “burn-in” (easy to avoid: just don’t leave the set on overnight with a single motionless picture on screen). 

LCDs are coming up quickly as plasma competitors, although they are still more costly and not quite up to plasma’s richness of image.  But LCD’s capacity for extremely high resolution, as in the Sharp’s LC37GD4U, will likely trump plasma in the long run.  A surprise contender for space in the living room is the new generation of rear-projection sets.  These aren’t the huge boxes with the fuzzy images that once lurked in the corner of the local sports bar.  This new breed uses microdisplay technology such as DLP (digital light processing) or LCoS (liquid crystal on silicon) to create HD images on screens in the 50 inch range and larger—in sets that are less than 18 inches deep.  They are also generally a bit cheaper than comparable plasma or LCD versions, as in Samsung’s new HL-P5085W. 

Once you have your screen, what to connect?  The biggest news in video is the advent of the DVR -- the hard-disk-based digital video recorders pioneered by TiVo but now duplicated, with varying levels of quality, in everything from cable and satellite TV boxes to DVD recorders to Media Center personal computers.  TiVo’s software is widely seen as the most elegant and user-friendly of the bunch, but its competitors are relentless.  One way or another, there’s a DVR in your future: the logical (and vastly more useful) replacement for the VCR.  (And if you’d still like both a DVR and a VCR, there’s the JVC HMHDS1U.)    

And of course, you’ll need a DVD player for movies. DVDs with high definition video are on the way, but as of now manufacturers are still battling over two competing standards. As long as that remains the case, consumers should steer clear.  Just make sure that the DVD player you buy is progressive-scan, and you’ll still be viewing images far sharper than anything you’ve previously seen on a television screen—for astonishingly low prices, as with the Sony DVP-NS575P. 

MORE FROM DIGITAL LIFE

Digital Life Section Front

Digital Life Section Front   Add Digital Life headlines to your news reader: