<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"  Home theater is the ultimate platform for buyer&amp;#039;s remorse. Formats change every few years, and in the past decade, the pace of that change has accelerated. Five years ago, 720p HDTVs were state of the art; now 1080p TVs have more than double the resolution. One high-definition disc format, HD DVD, was obsolete within two years of its introduction. So the market has long favored the procrastinator, since each new season brings equipment with improved technology at a lower price. But prices\u2014at least when it comes to TVs\u2014have stabilized. &amp;quot;Seeing declines of 50 percent every year ... those days are gone,&amp;quot; says Paul Gagnon, an analyst with research firm DisplaySearch. Still, equipment remains fairly affordable. A 50-inch LCD starts at about $1500; a comparable plasma, just over $1000. Waiting to buy probably won&amp;#039;t save you much money.  Those who haven&amp;#039;t shopped for home theater gear in a while, however, will find that the technological landscape has changed in ways that are subtler, yet perhaps more important, than the hi-def revolution of the past 10 years. The key advances: embedded intelligence and connectivity. These affect the way televisions, gaming systems and video players get content and how they display it.  Change favors the educated buyer. Learning the new vocabulary of features may be daunting, but it will give you access to a world of unprecedented choice and convenience. From our experience with some of the most advanced AV gear, we&amp;#039;ve identified several trends to keep on top of as you bring your TV room into the 21st century.  High-speed 240-Hz LCD HDTVs such as the Samsung 8000 series [ 1 ], the LG LH90 [ 2 ], the Sony Bravia Z-Series [ 3 ] and the Vizio VF551XVT [ 4 ] amp up television frame rates to fight motion blur. TVs Get Smarter ... Of all the changes occurring with home theater components, the new technology showing up in digital televisions may seem the most arcane. The language of HDTV has always been filled with confusing jargon, but much of the business about 480p, 720p, 1080i and 1080p that obsessed shoppers for the past few years essentially boiled down to a simple concept: Higher resolution is generally better. However, now that manufacturers are no longer just throwing pixels at consumers, they have begun to develop more sophisticated technology to iron out the shortcomings of digital video.  LCD televisions, for instance, have a well-established difficulty in displaying dark shadows and blacks. LCD works by filtering a constant backlight, so there is often light leakage that can produce a muddy gray where pixels are supposed to be black. Newer sets are shifting to LED backlighting from previous fluorescent backlights. (LEDs are not an alternative to LCD; the two technologies work together.) LED LCD TVs come in two flavors: backlit TVs that place LEDs behind the screen and edge-lit models that pipe in light from the sides of the frame. LED-backlit screens can perform a neat function called local dimming, in which sections of the screen vary brightness to improve the black level. Edge lighting doesn&amp;#039;t necessarily improve blacks, but it allows screens to get seriously skinny. ... And Fast Too.  A more nettlesome problem for LCD sets is caused by a trick of the eye that creates a perceived blur during fast-motion scenes. Other display technologies, including plasma, tube TV and even film projection, use rapidly flickering images. When the screen is dark between frames, your mind fills in the missing detail to perceive smooth motion. But LCD screens use a light source that is always on; most don&amp;#039;t have a dark phase. So LCD makers such as LG, Samsung, Sony and Vizio generate the in-between details for you by displaying up to nine artificial frames. These sets are sold by frame speed: 120 Hz and 240 Hz. (Normal television video runs at 60 Hz, or 60 frames per second.)  The higher rates result in smoother video. But things can get a little weird when watching movies, which are typically shot at 24 frames per second. In our test of a 46-inch Samsung Series 8000 model ($3200), the familiar lustrous feel of cinema footage was transformed by the 240-Hz technology into crisp video that looked as if it came from an HD camcorder. Luckily, if you don&amp;#039;t like the effect, you can turn it off. Even though motion blur is less of a problem with plasma sets, Panasonic&amp;#039;s Viera S1 plasmas (starting at $1100) are also seriously speedy. The S1&amp;#039;s 600-Hz subfield drive flashes pixels 10 times for every frame of video. A more important improvement: energy efficiency. Plasmas are well-known power hogs\u2014many 40-plus-inch TVs draw more than 400 watts. But a 46-inch S1 is rated at an average 207 watts.  A set-top box such as the Apple TV [ 1 ] or Roku Digital Video Player [ 2 ] is the easiest way to link your home theater to online services. New Gear Gets Connected ... To find the most transformative innovation in home theater equipment for the next decade, walk through your local Fry&amp;#039;s or Best Buy, then turn the receivers, disc players and set-top boxes around and look for RJ-45 Ethernet jacks. The proliferation of these little connectors and their Wi-Fi antenna counterparts in home theater gear is slowly but surely opening the door to let the Internet into the living room. This trend in connectivity has spread to almost every category of audiovisual component, from game consoles to disc players, and it has spawned a new generation of set-top boxes and services specifically designed to deliver online content to your TV. The cheapest and easiest to use of these networked boxes is the $100 Roku player, which can stream about 12,000 movies and TV episodes from Netflix and 45,000 titles from Amazon&amp;#039;s Video On Demand. Roku has also recently added access to Major League Baseball games and will soon provide commercial-supported programs.  Roku&amp;#039;s services use streaming video, so the quality is limited by the speed of your Internet connection. Netflix, for instance, has a minimum requirement of 1.5 megabits per second, which is about the speed of an entry-level broadband connection. Most offerings are in standard definition. And even most HD movie titles, such as The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Casino Royale, which we streamed from Amazon, don&amp;#039;t look much different from standard-def DVDs because of a relatively low bit rate (the amount of video data transmitted per second). Apple&amp;#039;s contribution to the living room, the Apple TV (starting at $229), allows for higher-quality video because content is downloaded to the device&amp;#039;s hard drive before playing. The Apple TV&amp;#039;s HD movies aren&amp;#039;t quite Blu-ray quality, but a few feet back from the screen you&amp;#039;d be hard-pressed to notice the difference. All the download video services allow viewers to start watching a movie or show after just part of it has downloaded. For standard-def movies the wait is generally only a few minutes, but our tests showed that an HD movie over a slow connection can take more than an hour before it&amp;#039;s watchable. ... Current Gear Gets an Upgrade ... Networked devices such as the TiVo HD DVR [ 1 ] and the Sony PlayStation 3 [ 2 ] can be updated to increase functionality. Both are now able to access online video. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.popularmechanics.com/culture/tv/how-to/a4776/4334534/>