I don’t really know much about US history, but this documentary caught my eye last night and was I glued to the TV for it’s entire length. It’s a fascinating tale about the release of confidential papers by Daniel Ellsburg that led to the revelation of the misinformation the government gave about the Vietnam war.

I watched this series on TV recently but an article at the Toronto Star mentioned that the entire series is available online. It’s a great showdown between Canada’s best chefs for charity.

There’s no such thing as an LED TV, at least not a mainstream TV you and I would buy at the store. However, Samsung has been advertising their new line of TV’s as “LED TV” and confusing many customers. Flat panel displays are either plasma and LCD. There are more fringe technologies like OLED but in reality at your local electronics store only those two are offered. The reason “LED” is used is because LCD TV’s can be backlit with either CCFL or LED technology.

CCFL, cold cathode fluorescent lamps, are your basic fluorescent lightbulb. They have been used as a LCD backlight for decades. Arriving on the scene two years ago, LED’s are used instead of a CCFL to light up an LCD TV. These LED-backlit TV’s have many advantages, including a bright, consistent backlight, low power consumption and the ability to make LCD’s even thinner than they are.

Causing more confusion are the two LED backlight configurations. Traditionally the LED backlight is behind the screen, lighting the screen from behind also allows a new technique called local dimming. This shuts of LED’s that are behind the black areas of the image, leading to “blacker blacks” which have always been a weak spot for all LCD TV’s. However, a cheaper version of LED backlights have been introduced called “edge lit”. Picture quality is not as good as backlit LED, but edgelit LED TV’s can be made remarkably thin.

Be on the lookout for these types of technologies when buying your new TV. The best LCD picture quality will be from an LED backlit LCD with local dimming.

LG has announced that the LH90 series of LCD televisions is coming to North America. Not only that, but it comes with THX certification.  One of the notable features, besides the local-dimming, LED backlight, is the ability to play DIVX movies from a USB port on the TV – as well as JPGs and MP3s. It comes in 55″, 47″ and 42″ sizes.

• • 2,000,000 : 1 MEGA Contrast Ratio
• • 1080p Full HD Resolution – TruMotion 240Hz
• • 24p Real Cinema
• • HDMI 1.3 with Deep Color

A few years ago, TV manufacturers hyped “Full HD” vs. normal HD televisions. The difference was instead of 720 vertical lines of resolution (720p) there was 1080 vertical lines (1080p). They even put “Full HD 1080p” stickers on the televisions to market them as being special.

The thing is, most people don’t sit close enough – or don’t buy a tv large enough – to notice the difference. It also doesn’t help that neither Rogers or Bell broadcasts any channels in 1080p (1080i is the highest, but that’s another show).

HD Guru has a chart on what the optimum viewing distance is for televisions. For my 46″ TV to notice 1080p details, it’s actually 72 inches, which is only six feet away. I sit 10 feet from the TV so maybe that’s a good excuse to buy a bigger TV.

A friend called me up recently to ask where to look for a new TV. Here are the two stores that I’ve been using over the last few years:

HDTV
325 Bamburgh Circle. Unit A103
Scarborough. ON
416-498-9233

Golden Electronics
9019 Bayview ave
Thornhill, ON L4B 3M6, Canada
(905) 881-7328