The author of the article, DisplayMate president Dr. Raymond Soneira, singled-out the lack of a respectable viewing angle on LCD TVs, as seen in the pictures below. If you think that Dr. Soneira is nitpicking, think again. He adds, “The significance of this [the narrow viewing angle] is enormous, because it means that the ’sweet spot’ for seeing an accurate picture on an LCD HDTV is only one person wide, even for these top-of-the-line models, so essentially everyone looking at an LCD HDTV will see a picture with noticeably different coloration.” Wow.

But more than praising plasma technology, Dr. Soneira criticized the “marketing gimmicks” of all TV manufacturers – hyping their TVs with “features” like Dynamic Backlight, Dynamic Contrast, Dynamic Black, Dynamic White, and Dynamic Color that do nothing but “reduce picture quality and accuracy and introduce ugly image artifacts.” Other features such as contrast ratios and brightness were either exaggerated or “misunderstood.” The sad part? Most customers don’t care. Perhaps in the HDTV market, size is all that matters for most people.

[via NY Times via tv snob]

The F40fd can take two pictures, two milliseconds apart. One photo has the flash on, while the other has the flash off. Then, the LCD viewfinder displays both images for you to choose from, side-by-side so you can choose the best one. In addition, the FinePix offers face detection that can identify up to 10 individual faces in a scene, then automatically optimize focus and exposure for the best picture. The camera also offers an image stabilization mode to eliminate blur from moving the camera or from moving subjects.

The camera offers 8.3 megapixel resolution and has a 3X optical zoom lens. It can also capture 640×480 video at 30fps. The camera has an xD/SD memory card slot for up to 2GB of storage. The FinePix F40fd can be found this Spring for around $270.