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. LCD TVs came out next and started to try and pull people away from plasma ones, then HDTV has come out in the last few years, so what is next?

A recent development has been the use of LEDs for the backlighting of an LCD TV, previously they used CCFLs (cold cathode fluorescent lamps) which are bulky compared to LEDs. There are two versions you can get, one where the LEDs are at the edge and the light is guided into the middle, or the better version where the LEDs are all across the back of the screen, either way you get a super slim screen compared to the CCFL versions.

3D televisions are starting to come onto the market now, but the reaction to them has not been that great because the technology is so new. The concept of having 3DTV is fantastic, but the execution still needs work because having to wear those silly glasses ruins it for most people. The ‘active shutter’ glasses currently being used give you a strange flickering effect you have to look through, and reports suggest the 3D effect doesn’t work when you sit more than a few feet away from the TV.

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. There are one or two companies working on commercial applications of 3D viewing without having to wear glasses, so hopefully that will filter down into our TVs soon.

OLEDs (organic light emitting diodes) are another technology which we can look forward to, although it has been in the pipeline for years and they can’t seem to get above a 13 inch screen at the moment. They are still working on it though to make larger screens which we can have in our homes, but if they do crack the current problems then the resulting TV will be just 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 55 inch LCD TV while you wait for 3D TV to take off, then consider the Samsung UN55B6000 which is really popular at the moment.