I saw a Panasonic ad in which the flat-panel TV is said to be “32V type.” Does anyone know what this “32V” refers to?
Thanks for your help.
Well, from what I can gather it’s simply a description of it’s size (in this case 32 inches).
The “V” comes in because the display is a widescreen, or 16:9 display.
Traditional TVs have a 4:3 aspect ratio: for every 4 inches horizontal you get three inches vertical. At some point someone (most likely the marketing department) decided that the bigger the number the better, so the diagonal measurement for TV size was developed. In other words, a 32" TV was 32 inches measured diagonally. Doing some basic math, I get a TV that is about 25.5" wide and 19.3" tall (these are rough estimates). This gives a total area of 492.15".
However, a 16:9 ratio TV (whether projection, LCD, plasma, etc) would have less total area for a given width. Given the 25.5" width of a 32" traditional TV, a 16:9 ratio display has only 14.34" of height. This gives a total area of 365.77".
What follows is purely guesswork, but I think that the plasma and LCD manufacturers have been forced to market their displays with some reference to the old 4:3 standard. Thus a 32V display is just as wide a 32" TV, but not as tall. This will not affect widescreen movies/shows at all, but it will affect normal 4:3 broadcasts. Thus watching Gladiator on your slick new 32V monitor will give you the full picture (and watching it on a 32" TV will give you the same size picture, but with black bars on the top and bottom), but while watching Judge Judy you will get black bars on the sides of your display.
Once again, that’s what I think is going on…I am not sure.