Who would have thought from viewing those early images of shadowy wriggling fingers broadcast in 1925 in the earliest TV sets that television would eventually become the multi-dimensional, full colour systems that Liquid Crystal Display /Flat Screen TV provide today. It has now become almost impossible for most people to do without TV.



So having established where and when television arrived in our daily lives, just what exactly is TV and how does it achieve the things that it does do if that is not too technical a description (joke)? From a grammatical derivation originating in a mixture of Greek (�tele� meaning far�) and Latin (�visual� meaning �sight�) the word television roughly translates as meaning �far sight�.

Like most forays into a technical arena nowadays it is very easy to get confused by the wide range of technical phrases and terminology in use within the industry today.

Now would be a good idea to concentrate purely on the digital aspect of television, its latest developments formats and bandwidth issues in use and exactly what all this technical jargon and terminology actually mean.

How would you define Digital TV? Digital television is much more flexible and efficient than conventional analogue television and digital signals provide a much clearer picture, much better sound quality and a far greater choice and availability of programming.

So what do all of the terms surrounding Digital TV mean? Using one of the newer LCD TV�s available will help us actually go through what all of this terminology actually means.

The LCD TV that we shall use for our illustrative purposes here is the Evesham Alqemi 32SX Flat Screen TV.

When considering a new Digital TV it would help if you were familiar with the following items of information.

The Screen resolution of the TV is possibly the most obvious place to start. Here we refer to the exact number of pixels that can be displayed in each dimension.

Next up is whether the TV is Hi-Definition Ready and what does this mean? Hi Definition TV essentially makes a TV picture in a quality format that is at least four times better than conventionally available at present.

We would need to look next at what types of connectors are used to connect the various peripherals that go to make the entire Digital Package work.

In this case we mean SCART Plugs and sockets and their usage. SCART stands for �Syndicat francais des Constructeurs d�Appareils Radio et Television (SCART).

The final item we would look at would be what is the nature and number of the High-Definition Multimedia Interfaces (HDMI) being used. The High Definition Multimedia Interface (HDMI) is a licensable audio/video connector interface for transmitting uncompressed digital streams between digital audio/video sources such as set-top box, HD DVD Player etc.

The Evesham Alqemi 32SX is a 32in LCD TV and the prices for these are around 600 pounds sterling or 1200 US dollars. The screen resolution is 1366 X 768 and with regards to being HD Ready the answer is yes. The Evesham has 2 (2 RGB) scarts and the type and number of Multimedia interfaces the Alqemi 32SX uses is HDMI and 1. The type of Tuner for this TV is Analogue and Digital and the Evesham is available from a wide variety of outlets.

So how would we rate the Evesham Alqemi 32SX?

Well to start with our score for the picture quality is 8, and closely tied in to the picture quality is the sound quality and our score for this would be 6. With regards to the availability and number of relevant connections, our score would be 6. As far as overall features are concerned we would give it 8 and the final individual verdicts would relate to the ease of use and overall value for money and our scores here would be, 8 and 10 respectively.

Finally our overall opinion would be that the visuals from this TV should serve notice on the more mainstream TV manufacturers that they had better watch out, there is definitely a new kid on the block.

With regards to the prices in this article we have tried in all cases to take an average across the industry from a number of well known web sites and so we ask you to bear this in mind and treat these prices as advisory only rather than absolutes.