In today’s technology driven world where new innovations are announced on pretty much a daily basis, it’s hard to forget that only 20 or so years ago most households in Britain watched one of only four TV channels; we listened to our favourite music on tape cassette, watched the latest movies on video and took photographs on film.
Digital was a pretty much unknown entity, phrases like iPod, pixels, plasma and LCD something that may as well have been coined by the creators of Star Trek for their entire relevancy.
Fast forward (or should that be skip track?) 20 years and we live in a digital age. Music is listened to and streamed digitally and most of us have benefited from purchasing cheap digital cameras so trips to the chemist to get film developed are pretty much a thing of the past.
Televisions are digital now, too. Where once they were only bought by the wealthy, plasma TVs and LCD TVs are now comparatively cheap televisions.
Few people actually know what it stands for, but LCD stands for ‘liquid crystal display’. LCD TVs work by using electric charges to manipulate pixels filled with liquid pixels to produce certain colours.
They are thinner and far lighter than cathode ray tubes - what used to power older TVs. For this reason TVs now no longer need to be so bulky, which is why they can be so thin and you can benefit from a flat screen.
While similar to plasma TVs in how they look, LCD TVs are different in terms of the technology they use, which does mean there are certain differences to think about for consumers. Just some of the benefits of LCD TVs are that they operate at cooler temperatures, and they can offer increased brightness to images, as well as the fact that they often weigh less – great if you want to mount the TV to the wall.
Contrast ratio can sometimes be lowered with LCD TVs however and occasionally pixels can burn out, leading the need to replace the screen. That said, as prices have come down in recent years Cheap LCD TVs offer consumers an affordable way to benefit from a really great TV watching experience.