The holiday shopping season is closer than you think, but is now the right time to splurge on a fancy flat-panel television?
Darned if I know. The HDTV universe is chock full of mysteries, from curious numbers (120Hz?? 1080p??) to revolving formats (LCD, plasma, OLED …).
So WWTW checked in with a couple of HDTV experts to get their take on the state of the TV industry as well as what the near future could bring.
First, the bad news.
Consumers likely won’t see the kind of price erosion typical of recent holiday shopping seasons, says Alfred Poor, a longtime contributor to PC Magazine and the mind behind HDTVprofessor.com.
“The fact that we appear to be in a slightly less supply than demand state would also favor little further drop in price, if any,” Poor says. But the holiday season can be unpredictable, so there’s still a small chance that prices will drop more than anticipated.
Some big box outlets will do whatever it takes to lure customers into their stores, he says.
Phillip Swann, who oversees TVPredictions.com, says the best bargains this season will likely be with 720p sets, which offer less resolution than their 1080p peers but still deliver a crisp, clear picture for your TV dollar.
Some consumers, WWTW included, may be confused about the latest innovation to hit the flat panel market – LED televisions. But Poor says there’s no such thing as an LED TV outside what you see at major sports arenas and on billboards. The latest LED sets are LCD panels with LED backlights.
Poor blames some industry leaders for the confusion – Samsung’s “LED TV” marketing material never even mentions the term “LCD,” he says.
These new LED backlight sets offer a thinner presentation and gobble up less energy, plus they provide “better color gamut performance” than existing sets, according to Poor.
Naturally, these new sets cost more than traditional LCD televisions, and Poor predicts they’ll remain only a small amount of the overall sets sold in the near future.
LCD will continue to dominate the television scene overall, Poor says, as plasma sets continue to shrink in popularity. Swann agrees, although he thinks plasma sets will sell briskly thanks to shops aggressively pricing these sets.
And if you’re looking to hold back your cash until the next flat panel innovation comes our way, don’t bother.
Poor says Mitsubishi’s LaserTV falls back on a rear projection format which won’t click with most consumers, and talk of OLED sets (organic light emitting diode) have stalled thanks to exhorbitant production costs.
Perhaps the only game changer heading our way is talk of 3-D televisions. Poor predicts these sets won’t have significant sales until 2012 at the earliest since there won’t be much 3-D ready content for consumers to see.
Swann also doubts that format will have much traction.
“Three-D will be hyped but will have few sales,” Swann says.
Related posts:
on 
on 
