USING WIND POWER FOR FUN: YOUR NEW LCD TV

If you’re lucky enough to live in a start where a large portion of your grid is fed by wind power, you can enjoy your new LCD TV with no guilt. All the HD, none of the guilt. But what’s the right LCD TV for you?

There are a number of important decisions that you have to make. The first is: How Big? Although some of us believe there’s no such thing as too big, in fact, if you’ve ever tried sitting just a few feet from a very large (100”) screen, you know that’s not true. A good rule of thumb to follow is to sit one-and-one-half to two-and-one-half times the diagonal size of an HD screen away. In other words, if you are looking to buy a 50 inch screen, you’d want to sit between six feet (72 inches) and ten-and-a-half feet (106 inches) away.

The next decision is what resolution. You really have two choices in LCD: 1080 or 720. A 1080 HDTV has 1920×1080 pixels, while a 720 HDTV has 1280×720 pixels—that’s twice as much for the 1080. That being said, if you’re looking at a smaller panel (50” or smaller, especially if you are not sitting right on top of it), you will likely not see the difference between the two resolutions. At that point, for the same money, you would do better to buy a good 720p set than a lower quality 1080p set (or a good 720p set instead of a good 1080p set).