Ok, so I spent more time on the graphic than the writing so far...

Big Screens

How to put an IMAX in your Living Room

Your neighbor’s is bigger. Your brother-in-law’s is bigger. Hell, even your parent’s is bigger. If you’ve been watching movies and sports on a postage stamp-sized console TV from the 80s’, it’s time to start thinking about joining the rest of the planet. Today’s TVs are more about home theater than crowding around to watch a sitcom, and starting a home theater is first and foremost about size. With the higher resolution and advanced imagery of High Definition TV, bigger pretty much IS better. But as soon as you take your first trip to the Super-TV-Buy-Mart, you’ll discover that choosing a set is much more complicated than picking a brand and a size. There’s lots of different ways to make a big TV, so if you don’t know your HDTV from your HDMI (see Jargospeak on page 15) sit tight and we’ll try and sort it all out for you. You’ll probably be picking from the 5 following types of TVs: Tube, Rear Projection, Plasma, LCD, or Front Projection.

Tube – This is your grandpa’s TV: the kind you grew up with. Inside the outer shell is a humungous glass tube shooting charged electrons at a screen. The bigger the TV, the bigger (and deeper and heavier…) the tube.

Rear Projection – This class encompasses several technologies, including DLP (the most common), LCD, and LCoS. They all project the image from behind the screen from a tiny projector, and are all much improved from the projection TVs of the 80s’ and 90s’.

Plasma – Two panes of glass sandwich around a mixture of gases. When the gases are charged, they turn into a plasma, which emits light.

LCD – Stands for Liquid Crystal Display (yes, it’s the same thing that’s in your laptop, only bigger). Very thin sheets of matrixed transistors can be turned on and off to allow the correct amount of light and color for each pixel.

Front Projector – For the serious aficionado, this technology requires a screen and usually a fairly dark environment to allow you to project the images from across the room.

(That's the intro, more to follow...)