TVs have come a long way since I was young, I used to watch our huge CRT TV in the front room and thought that was good, even though the back stuck out about 2 feet! Then plasma TVs started to emerge and suddenly you could hang your TV on the wall, which compared to the old CRT units was like magic. Finally LCD TVs came out and started to compete with the plasma ones, and HDTV came onto the scene recently too, so where are we going now?

Well a recent change is with the LCD TVs, normally they have a CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent lamp) at the back to provide lighting for the screen, but that is usually quite bulky, the latest TVs that have just started to come out use LEDs instead as the light source for the screen. You can get a version with LEDs that span the entire back of the screen, and that provides the best solution, or you can get ones where the LEDs just sit at the side instead, with either version then you get a super slim TV to enjoy.

Then we have 3D TVs coming onto the market, although the reception for them has been guarded. The concept of 3D television is excellent, and I have seen firsthand how powerful 3D movies can be, but at the moment you have to wear funny glasses that make it less usable. Currently the TVs use ‘active shutter’ technology which means the glasses need to have shutters in them that open and close many times a second, that gives the experience a strange flickering effect, plus reports suggest that the 3D effect on the TVs won’t work if you sit more than a few feet away from the unit.

Remember these are the first generation of 3DTVs though, so the people who like to have the newest toys will buy these models, then the rest of us will wait for them to improve the technology and buy the later versions of them. I have heard of companies working on TVs that don’t need glasses, and that is the perfect solution if they can find a way to get that to work.

OLEDs (organic light emitting diodes) are also a promising technology, which unfortunately at the moment is limited to very small computer monitors about 13 inches in size. They are still trying to get round the problems of creating larger screens with this technology, but if they do crack it then you can expect to have a TV hanging on the wall which is mere millimeters thick! So the future of TV is certainly interesting, I can’t wait to see what things will be like in 5 years time…

If you want a huge LED LCD TV then at the moment something like the Samsung UN55B8000 is popular.