The CRT has been a staple of the TV industry since its inception and is typically the most affordable type of RPTV (rear-projection television). Many people, including yours truly, still believe that a properly calibrated CRT rear- or front-projection set will ultimately provide the best image reproduction, especially with HDTV and DVD sources.

YOU CAN RESEARCH native resolution, inputs and a variety of other hard specifications, but in order to tell how well a display will reproduce its image, you have to physically see it.

Admittedly, CRT-based units are a bit temperamental if you want absolute peak performance from them, and they will require the most maintenance to keep the image as good as it can be. Things like convergence drift (where the red, green and blue images don’t line up correctly to create a single image) can occur. Although many newer RPTV models have easy user convergence or in some cases have auto-convergence (where one press of a button aligns the TV colors automatically), front projectors don’t, and few people want to converge a TV set anyway, whether it’s easy or not. Most of us just want to watch TV, not spend hours adjusting it.

The other category is digital displays: DLP, LCD and LCoS. Unlike a CRT, digital displays use a lamp that either reflects off of a microchip or shines through a panel that is creating the image. The microchip or panel is made up of a fixed grid of hundreds of thousands of individual picture elements, or pixels, that create the image. As a result, there is no convergence to mess with, and aside from replacing the lamp every 5,000 to 8,000 hours (around three to five years of average use), these units are virtually maintenance-free.