How to Get a More Connected, Intelligent Home Theater

• home theaters
• HDTV
• stereos
• surroundsound
• audio
• DVR
• Blu-ray
• speakers

Home theater is the ultimate platform for buyer’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—at least when it comes to TVs—have stabilized. “Seeing declines of 50 percent every year … those days are gone,” 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’t save you much money.

Those who haven’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’ve identified several trends to keep on top of as you bring your TV room into the 21st century.

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’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’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’t like the effect, you can turn it off.

Even though motion blur is less of a problem with plasma sets, Panasonic’s Viera S1 plasmas (starting at $1100) are also seriously speedy. The S1’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—many 40-plus-inch TVs draw more than 400 watts. But a 46-inch S1 is rated at an average 207 watts.

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