Cutting through the confusion
If you're the kind of person who researches products and weighs their pros and cons before making a purchase decision, shopping for a new television can be an overwhelming experience. Confusion plagues even the most careful shoppers, and TV manufacturers, marketers, and vendors often create more uncertainty as they push extra features, new technologies, and add-ons in the incessant pursuit of profit.
We hope that this guide, which we created in 2002 and have updated every year since, will help you cut through the confusion with unbiased information so that you can select a new television. It won't answer every question, and when you read it, it won't tell you "the perfect TV for you" at the end. But we hope it can provide you with the basic tools you need to navigate this ever-evolving market segment.
If these eight pages encompass too much information for one dose, you can skip to our Best TVs lists to find our current top TV recommendations based on our reviews. We can't review every TV--not by a long shot--so in the end, we hope that our guide helps you make the ultimate buying decision by narrowing down the most important factors.
One important factor we can't fully address directly in a general guide, however, is overall picture quality. It varies quite a bit from model to model, and images one viewer likes might seem garish, washed-out, or otherwise unacceptable to another viewer. Our product reviews focus primarily on this, and spell out differences from a critical perspective, so if you're looking for more "PQ"-related details than this guide provides, they're the best place to start.
With that in mind, let's get started.
