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Many of us are now thinking about replacing our old tube TVs with a widescreen flat panel plasma or LCD. The problem is that it’s not completely straightforward to compare one style to the other. A specification as simple as size, for example, needs to be qualified because the screens have a different aspect ratio. Widescreens use the same diagonal measurement, but what does that actually mean when you’re watching “The Office” on Thursday night? That’s where the Display Wars website comes in. Enter in the two screens you’d like to compare, and it will give you an image representation of the relative sizes and shapes, as well as a summary of statistics. It’s interesting that if you are watching a channel that is not HD (i.e. that new widescreen TV will have black bars on the sides), you would need to have a 44 inch screen in order to have a picture as big as a 36 inch tube TV. On the other hand, the 36 inch tube TV will show widescreen content equivalent to a 33 inch screen.
Good site…I usually have to dig around for 1/2 hour to find a good one when people ask me which TV to buy so I can tell them which 16:9 screen will show them analog TV pictures in the same (or bigger) size than they are watching on their current CRT. This is better (although I wish they would center the two screen images on top of each other for a more obvious comparison).
Good to see you back here…I noticed that it seemed that parenthood had taken a toll on your posting there for a bit.
I agree that there’s some room for improvement with the Display Wars site. Sometimes it helps to swap display 1 and 2, but I’d like to be able to click and drag them around to get a better idea of how one matches up with the other. They need to put as much time into their tool as they put into their fancy flash advertising.