For Shoppers, a TV Guide By ROY FURCHGOTT

For Shoppers, a TV Guide By ROY FURCHGOTT

WHEN most people buy a television, they measure the wall where they want to put it and then pick the largest screen that will fit. That is exactly the right way to buy a big TV, but it misses the point if you want the right TV.

The good news is that picture quality has improved radically in the last five years, even as prices have plummeted. The bad news: there are a bewildering number of specifications and features to consider. Many of them will matter only to hard-core videophiles, but some are critical to everyone.

One of the basic features is the type of set. Although projection and tube televisions are still available, most people choose either a plasma set or one of the two types of LCD televisions.

Most of the professional installers I consulted prefer plasma televisions. And if you want a flat-screen model that is wider than 50 inches, there are few other choices.

The installers say that plasma sets have the smoothest motion, the truest blacks — more on that later — and are more easily watched from side angles than the LCD variety. Moreover, “plasma is generally cheaper,” said Shawn G. DuBravac, the director of research for the Consumer Electronics Association.

But plasmas also use more energy than LCD sets — making them more expensive to run — and LCD sets can work better in bright rooms because they have higher bright settings than plasmas. “The electricity cost of powering the TV, even for the largest models, amounts to less than $2 a week,” Mr. DuBravac said. “That’s if you watch TV five hours a day, seven days a week.” The cost may not bother every customer.

There are also big differences among LCD sets. One technical distinction is that older LCD sets are backlighted by a fluorescent lamp, while the newer ones, called “LED LCDs,” are lighted by hundreds of LEDs. These models can be brighter and have a higher contrast than their older cousins, and they are thinner, too — less than an inch compared with three or so inches.

LED screens tend to have better black levels than the older LCDs. The reason: Regular LCD sets create black by closing off a crystal, but light can still leak through — think of a cloth draped over a lamp. The LED variety, with its hundreds of individual lamps, can effectively turn off the light source — that is, click off the light rather than drape a cloth over it. But even that is not perfect. Although there are hundreds of lamps, there are millions of the pixels that make up the set’s picture, so a “black” area will still have a few lighted pixels. In plasma sets, however, the cells that make up the picture are lighted individually, making its blacks better still.

Resolution — the sharpness of the picture — is a second major factor for buyers. A few years ago, there was a complex variety of choices, but there are now just two — 720p or 1080p. (These terms refer to the number of lines on the screen, with anything higher than 720 considered high definition.)

Generally, 1080 offers finer resolution at a higher price, but that is not the end of the story because television broadcasts, DVDs and Blu-ray all enter the set at different resolutions. To make the number of lines from the source match the number of lines on the set, the television must use its computing power to scale the picture, and its ultimate quality will depend on how well the set’s computer and software do their jobs.

There is no measurement for computing power. You have to rely on your eyes at the store, and maybe on experts’ and owners’ reviews. In one case, though, the 1080 is inarguably better, and that is for Blu-ray discs. They have 1,080 lines of resolution, so they can match any television bearing the same measure. To get the most from Blu-ray, however, dig deep into the owner’s manual to make sure the television set accepts a “24p” signal, (look under “allowable” or “supported” input signals). If not, even with the 1,080 match, the set will need to do more processing to convert the signal properly.

What about 3-D televisions? One downside is that the number of 3-D programs and films is sharply limited. A 3-D set is also nearly double the cost of a comparable 2-D set, and that does not include the cost of 3-D glasses, which are weightier than the old cardboard versions and cost $100 to $300.

As with many television tech issues, there is yet another twist: because 3-D requires so much processing power, the sets tend to have excellent computer processing. That capability means better pictures — even for people who use the sets only for 2-D viewing.

Unfortunately, the televisions’ computers are complex, and appraising them is not easy. Be sure to pay attention to the refresh rate. That is the speed at which the set can put up new pictures, and it affects how fluidly images move on the screen.

Video purists prefer a refresh rate of 60 hertz because it is “true” — the same rate as that of broadcast television. But on either kind of LCD set, that slow a rate can blur the motion in sports broadcasts and action movies. (“Motion blurring is not an issue” on plasma TVs, said Bill Schindler, a television engineer and researcher.)

To minimize blurring on LCD sets, many people prefer a 120-hertz refresh rate. When broadcast television sends out its 60 pictures a second, a 120-hertz set must fill in twice as many frames, guessing what a picture between the two broadcast images would look like, and then creating it. Most sets can handle a 120 rate effectively — but a 240-hertz rate can mean problems.

“There is an awful lot of interpolation going on at these higher frame rates,” Mr. Schindler said. “In the case of 240 you have to make up three pictures” for every real one received.

Moreover, the more processing required, the greater the likelihood of “artifacts” — processing mistakes that show up on the screen. A classic artifact: spokes that “appear to be going backward” on a stagecoach in a Western, said Joe Kane, a video display consultant. “If the processing isn’t very good, they appear to be going backward even worse.”

More and more televisions can be linked to the Internet, but if you plan to buy one, keep two things in mind. First, apart from the set itself, the quality of what you get will depend on your Internet speed. That may mean one more thing to upgrade. Second, as you browse, realize that the sites and services available on a Web-enabled television may change after your purchase. If a film service — Hulu or Vudu, for example — becomes more widely used, a TV maker may add it to the menu of links available. The shifting array of features makes comparison shopping difficult.

“If something is popular,” said Mr. DuBravac of the Consumer Electronics Association, “it’s going to be developed for multiple devices.”

Finally, what about the size of the set — the feature that many people deem all-important? Buyers may think they know the proper size, said Sy Paulson, a manager at the Best Buy store at Union Square in Manhattan, but their calculations are frequently “hit or miss.”

The critical factor is the distance between the viewer and the set. The rule of thumb is to take that distance — say, 60 inches — and divide by three, and the result — 20 inches — is the ideal height of the screen. (Screen height is usually about half the screen’s diagonal measure.)

With high definition, the picture will look good even close up. But if you get too close, you risk whiplash just trying to follow the action.

$73 an Hour: Adding It Up By DAVID LEONHARDT

December 10, 2008
Economic Scene
$73 an Hour: Adding It Up By DAVID LEONHARDT

Seventy-three dollars an hour.

That figure — repeated on television and in newspapers as the average pay of a Big Three autoworker — has become a big symbol in the fight over what should happen to Detroit. To critics, it is a neat encapsulation of everything that's wrong with bloated car companies and their entitled workers.

To the Big Three's defenders, meanwhile, the number has become proof positive that autoworkers are being unfairly blamed for Detroit's decline. "We've heard this garbage about 73 bucks an hour," Senator Bob Casey, a Pennsylvania Democrat, said last week. "It's a total lie. I think some people have perpetrated that deliberately, in a calculated way, to mislead the American people about what we're doing here."

So what is the reality behind the number? Detroit's defenders are right that the number is basically wrong. Big Three workers aren't making anything close to $73 an hour (which would translate to about $150,000 a year).

But the defenders are not right to suggest, as many have, that Detroit has solved its wage problem. General Motors, Ford and Chrysler workers make significantly more than their counterparts at Toyota, Honda and Nissan plants in this country. Last year's concessions by the United Automobile Workers, which mostly apply to new workers, will not change that anytime soon.

And yet the main problem facing Detroit, overwhelmingly, is not the pay gap. That's unfortunate because fixing the pay gap would be fairly straightforward.

The real problem is that many people don't want to buy the cars that Detroit makes. Fixing this problem won't be nearly so easy.

The success of any bailout is probably going to come down to Washington's willingness to acknowledge as much.

Let's start with the numbers. The $73-an-hour figure comes from the car companies themselves. As part of their public relations strategy during labor negotiations, the companies put out various charts and reports explaining what they paid their workers. Wall Street analysts have done similar calculations.

The calculations show, accurately enough, that for every hour a unionized worker puts in, one of the Big Three really does spend about $73 on compensation. So the number isn't made up. But it is the combination of three very different categories.

The first category is simply cash payments, which is what many people imagine when they hear the word "compensation." It includes wages, overtime and vacation pay, and comes to about $40 an hour. (The numbers vary a bit by company and year. That's why $73 is sometimes $70 or $77.)

The second category is fringe benefits, like health insurance and pensions. These benefits have real value, even if they don't show up on a weekly paycheck. At the Big Three, the benefits amount to $15 an hour or so.

Add the two together, and you get the true hourly compensation of Detroit's unionized work force: roughly $55 an hour. It's a little more than twice as much as the typical American worker makes, benefits included. The more relevant comparison, though, is probably to Honda's or Toyota's (nonunionized) workers. They make in the neighborhood of $45 an hour, and most of the gap stems from their less generous benefits.

The third category is the cost of benefits for retirees. These are essentially fixed costs that have no relation to how many vehicles the companies make. But they are a real cost, so the companies add them into the mix — dividing those costs by the total hours of the current work force, to get a figure of $15 or so — and end up at roughly $70 an hour.

The crucial point, though, is this $15 isn't mainly a reflection of how generous the retiree benefits are. It's a reflection of how many retirees there are. The Big Three built up a huge pool of retirees long before Honda and Toyota opened plants in this country. You'd never know this by looking at the graphic behind Wolf Blitzer on CNN last week, contrasting the "$73/hour" pay of Detroit's workers with the "up to $48/hour" pay of workers at the Japanese companies.

These retirees make up arguably Detroit's best case for a bailout. The Big Three and the U.A.W. had the bad luck of helping to create the middle class in a country where individual companies — as opposed to all of society — must shoulder much of the burden of paying for retirement.

So here's a little experiment. Imagine that a Congressional bailout effectively pays for $10 an hour of the retiree benefits. That's roughly the gap between the Big Three's retiree costs and those of the Japanese-owned plants in this country. Imagine, also, that the U.A.W. agrees to reduce pay and benefits for current workers to $45 an hour — the same as at Honda and Toyota.

Do you know how much that would reduce the cost of producing a Big Three vehicle? Only about $800.

That's because labor costs, for all the attention they have been receiving, make up only about 10 percent of the cost of making a vehicle. An extra $800 per vehicle would certainly help Detroit, but the Big Three already often sell their cars for about $2,500 less than equivalent cars from Japanese companies, analysts at the International Motor Vehicle Program say. Even so, many Americans no longer want to own the cars being made by General Motors, Ford and Chrysler.

My own family's story isn't especially unusual. For decades, my grandparents bought American and only American. In their apartment, they still have a framed photo of the 1933 Oldsmobile that my grandfather's family drove when he was a teenager. In the photo, his father stands proudly on the car's running board.

By the 1970s, though, my grandfather became so sick of the problems with his American cars that he vowed never to buy another one. He hasn't.

Detroit's defenders, from top executives on down, insist that they have finally learned their lesson. They say a comeback is just around the corner. But they said the same thing at the start of this decade — and the start of the last one and the one before that. All the while, their market share has kept on falling.

There is good reason to keep G.M. and Chrysler from collapsing in 2009. (Ford is in slightly better shape.) The economy is in the worst recession in a generation. You can think of the Detroit bailout as a relatively cost-effective form of stimulus. It's often cheaper to keep workers in their jobs than to create new jobs.

But Congress and the Obama administration shouldn't fool themselves into thinking that they can preserve the Big Three in anything like their current form. Very soon, they need to shrink to a size that reflects the American public's collective judgment about the quality of their products.

It's a sad story, in many ways. But it can't really be undone at this point. If we had wanted to preserve the Big Three, we would have bought more of their cars.

E-mail: leonhardt@nytimes.com

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/10/business/economy/10leonhardt.html?sq=Leonhardt&st=cse&scp=2&pagewanted=print

http://snipurl.com/83j8s

About.co: 8 DVD/ VCR Combo Recommendations

Top 8 DVD Recorder - VHS VCR Combinations

From Robert Silva,
Your Guide to Home Theater.
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DVD recorder/VCR combos are here. For those that are both replacing a VCR and want a DVD recorder, this flexible option gives you the best of the old and the new. You can use these units to play DVDs and VHS tapes, as well as record or copy homemade recordings (such as camcorder tapes, television recordings, etc...). However, keep in mind that DVD recorder/VCR combos cannot be used to copy commercially made DVD movies to VHS or commercially made VHS movies to DVD, due to copy-protection.

1. JVC DR-MV99B DVD Recorder/VCR Combination

The JVC DR-MV99B is a DVD Recorder/VCR combo that offers both good performance and a versatile feature package. This combo records on both the DVD+R/RW and DVD-R/RW formats and plays back most DVD and CD formats, including MP3 and Divx files. In addition, using the VCR section, the consumer can both record directly to VHS (HiFi) or dub non-copyprotected video content from VHS to DVD or DVD to VHS. The MV99B also has a front mounted DV input (iLInk) that allows direct video and audio transfer from digital camcorders. Also, with its HDMI output the DR-MV99B can upscale to both DVD and VHS up to 1080i The MV99B is also equipped with an ATSC tuner, for the reception of digital TV signals after Feb. 17, 2009.

Manufacturer's Site

2. Panasonic DMR-EZ47VK DVD Recorder/VCR Combo

The Panasonic DMR-EZ47VK has just about everything a user needs in a DVD recorder/VCR combo, including the ability to record most DVD formats and play back most DVD and CD formats, including Divx, MP3, and Divx files. In addition using the VCR section, the consumer can both record directly to VHS or dub non-copyprotected video content from VHS to DVD or DVD to VHS. Also, with Panasonic's enhanced 4-hour recording mode, you can record sporting events and longer movies onto DVD with the same video quality as the 2-hour recording mode. The incorporation of HDMI and video upscaling makes the EZ47VK a good partner for use with an HDTV. The 47VK also has an ATSC tuner, for the reception of digital tv signals after Feb. 17, 2009.

3. Toshiba DVR650 DVD Recorder/VCR Combination

The Toshiba DVR650 is a very flexible DVD recorder/VCR combo. Some of the practical features include the ability to record in most DVD formats and play back most DVD and CD formats, including Divx, MP3, and WMA files. In addition using the VCR section, the consumer can both record directly to VHS or dub non-copyprotected video content from VHS to DVD or DVD to VHS. The incorporation of HDMI and video upscaling to 1080i makes the DVR650 easy to use with an HDTV. This unit also has both an NTSC, ATSC, and QAM tuners, for the reception of digital tv and basic digital cable signals after Feb. 17, 2009.

4. Sony RDR-VX555 DVD Recorder/VCR Combo

The Sony RDR-VX555 is a DVD Recorder/VCR combo with a twist. Unlike most other DVD recorders and DVD recorder/VCR combos, this unit has no built-in tuner. In order to record TV programs, you must connect a Cable Box, Satellite Box, or other type of Desktop Box used for receiving either analog or digital television signals. However, the VX555 certainly does not leave out other important features, such as multi-format DVD recording and playback, DVD to VHS and VHS to DVD crossdubbing, iLink DV video input for digital camcorders, CD playback, and video upscaling via HDMI output. If you are looking for a DVD recorder/VCR combo, and used a separate box for accessing television programming, check out the Sony RDR/V555.

5. Samsung DV-VR357 DVD Recorder - VCR Combination

If you are confused about whether to replace that aging VCR with a DVD recorder, now may be the time with the Samsung VR357 DVD Recorder/VCR combo. The VR357 records to all five recordable formats DVD-R/DVD-RW/DVD-R/+RW and DVD-RAM, and has composite, S-Video, and iLink video inputs. In addition, on the DVD playback side, the VR357 can play back Divx files and has both component and HDMI video outputs and features 720p/1080i upscaling via the HDMI output. Of course the Vr357 can still record and play back VHS tapes. However, keep in mind that to record television programs, you need to use an external tuner, such as cable or satellite box. To find out more details on whether the VR357 is right for you, download the User Manual.

6. Toshiba DVR-600 DVD Recorder/VCR Combo

The Toshiba DVR600 is a basic DVD recorder/VCR combo with practical featuress, including the ability to record in most DVD formats and play back most DVD and CD formats, including Divx, MP3, and WMA files. In addition, using the VCR section, the consumer can both record directly to VHS or dub non-copyprotected video content from VHS to DVD or DVD to VHS. The incorporation of HDMI and video upscaling to 1080i makes the DVR600 easy to use with an HDTV. However, keep in mind that this DVD recorder/VCR combo does not have built-in tuners. In order to record television programming, you need to connect a cable box, satellite box, or DTV converter into the audio/video line inputs of the DVR600.

7. Sony RDR-VXD655 DVD recorder/VCR combo

Sony's RDR-VXD655 DVD recorder/VCR combo has the ability to record in four of the five available recordable DVD formats: DVD+R/DVD+R DL/DVD+RW/DVD-R/DVD-RW so you can make DVDs that will play in just about any DVD player. Of course, you can still record and play back in VHS. This is not only a flexible recorder but has high-end playback features, including progressive scan and video upscaling via HDMI. Add a full complement of video inputs, including a DV input, and the incorporation of both NTSC and ATSC tuners, this DVD recorder/VCR combo is ready for the analog-to-digital Television broadcast transition on February 17, 2009.

Manufacturer's Site

8. JVC SR-DVM700US DVD/miniDV/Hard Drive Combination Recorder

If you are looking for a DVD recorder that is a cut-above the typical consumer-based unit, you might want to check out a professional unit, such as the JVC SR-DVM700US. This recorder not only features DVD-R/-RW and DVD-RAM recording capability, combined with a large 250GB hard drive, but also adds miniDV recording and playback capability. In addition, the DVM700US also has cross-dubbing and editing capability. Although the capabilities of this unit are extensive, it does not have a built-in tuner or 720p/1080i/1080p upscaling output capability, and is expensive. This is definitely a unit best suited for the more serious user or video editor. For a detailed look at the features and functions of the JVC SR-DVM700US, download the User Manual.