What Makes a TV Get a Good Review?

So here's the deal: for the asking price you can’t go wrong, and a demo is recommended. The review ends there, and then you are on your own – at the mercy of marketing jargon, unknown technical spiel, and whatnot. There are a lot of products available, each unique in itself. So when you first set foot in the market after reading a review, you may feel convinced about brand X. And then you rely on your judgment and pick up the product you have long been saving for.

Wouldn’t it be better if you had some added ammo while making your precious purchase, like knowing what exactly to look for? This feature explains what we at Tech2 look at while 'reviewing' a TV. It’s a sort of jargon-buster combined with bit of gyaan for the techie, and also the consumer who wants to get the most out of his/her hard-earned money. We are not going into excess technical calibration, rather using our human eyes and basic ideas to see whether the TV is good or bad. You may already know lots of this stuff, but nevertheless here we go...

Out of the Box
This is the first section in many reviews. What you look for here is nothing out of the ordinary. Just see how the device looks. It helps better halves to decide whether the product matches the sofa covers or the vase in the living room. It also lets you see what connections are present and where, if the buttons are well-placed, easily reachable etc. You can also check what components are available with the unit: interconnect cables, adapters, plug converters, and the like.

Then comes the physical setup. This is something you don’t have to worry about so much, as all big retailers send a technician home to set things up. But if you want to lug your heavy plasma around, make sure the process won’t prove too tedious. When we review any TV, I make a note of the setup.

Last comes the connection. If you connect via HDMI, you can choose your DVD player to do the upscaling. If it's a component connection, it's your TV that brings it up to its native 720 or 1080. All LCDs and plasmas, by virtue of their technology, are progressive in nature – that is, they display full images in sequence. So if your DVD player has progressive turned off, it’s the TV that will do the deinterlacing or pulldown. For more on this obscure stuff check here.

Clarity
After you plug in your source and display, it’s vital to know at least the performance of one of the products. If you are buying both afresh, a combined effect may be inspected. The caveat is that some problem might arise in the video, and you won’t know what's causing it. Let’s say you're looking at a TV for the first time. The first thing that comes across (to me at least) is the clarity and detail in the image.

The right sharpness in a still image is important, as too much can cause a strain on the eyes in the long run, while too little makes the image soft or blurred. Check for borders between straight edges and shapes, and for any ‘bleeding’. Overdone sharpness creates artifacts, such as replicas of borders around images, called haloing.

This can become so accented that the image may look as if it’s wrapped in glossy plastic. DVD players, TVs and projectors all must be scrutinized for detail. Also, noise is something that you must check for, the same time you check out the clarity. Look at the left side of the flower pic to see what noise is, and you'll see why it’s hated so much. It's that graininess in the image, and is caused by bad cables too sometimes...