HDTV Tech

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose. By any other name would smell as sweet.”

Quick! Name the play! It’s Romeo and Juliet, of course. And it’s certainly one of Bill Shakespeare’s best lines, particularly in the way it encapsulates Juliet’s whole Montague/Capulet dilemma.

Did you read that headline in Seinfeld's voice? While contrast ratio, black level, and light output all rightly occupy the top of the list of specs one considers when purchasing a new display, color is often completely overlooked.

Good color reproduction usually won't make or break a display, but it can make one that's good into one that's great.

Yet for all its importance, it's rarely understood - and it's regularly done wrong.

Buying a new TV ain't what it used to be—there are a lot more choices and features to think about than yesteryear, when the only decision you needed to make was screen size. Among the most common questions I'm asked these days is, "Should I get an LCD or plasma flat-panel TV?" If you want the quick answer, jump to the end of this article. But if you want to understand the answer, read on.

When we wrote this feature for last year’s HDTV Buyer’s Guide issue, the flat-panel HDTV market was much simpler. 3D was nowhere in sight, and much of our analysis boiled down to the pros and cons of LCD and plasma technology. This year, 3D is just one of the newer wrinkles in the market. The number of plasmas in the market isn’t what it was just a few years ago, but plasma is not only hanging on, the best plasmas still stake a legitimate claim to being the best flat panels available. With LCDs, manufacturers are aggressively using the backlighting techniques to market the sets. In fact, LCDs are getting more and more sophisticated and offering serious potential value. There’s a lot to learn, so let’s get going.

There’s more that goes into making a good display than accurate color, but it’s certainly one of the biggies. Color in a video display may seem like a relatively simple subject, but it’s not. In this Gear Works, I’ll outline the two most important factors in assessing and measuring the color accuracy of the HDTVs we review—color tracking and color gamut. I’ll also show you how we present this in the HT Labs Measures graphics that accompany our reviews. This article will shed some light on what these important measurements tell us about the color accuracy of the displays we test here at Home Theater.