Cooktops:

A Great Division Of Labor

By The Vann’s Editorial Team

Imagine Shaquille O'Neal decides to quit basketball and take up professional cooking. Shaq’s endeavor won’t get that far if he’s using a traditional combination cooktop/oven that's less than four feet high. Granted, he's got a big wingspan, but he might suffer eyestrain trying to focus on food that far away. With a cooktop, he can customize his cooking set up and make slam-dunk meals. Shaq-etizer, anyone? While the average cook doesn't need to worry about that level of customization, flexibility in design allows you to develop a more creative, pleasant, and useful space. Plus, a cooktop can be placed on virtually any countertop, including islands, so your design options are wide open.

Imagine Shaquille O'Neal decides to quit basketball and take up professional cooking. Shaq’s endeavor won’t get that far if he’s using a traditional combination cooktop/oven that's less than four feet high. Granted, he's got a big wingspan, but he might suffer eyestrain trying to focus on food that far away. With a cooktop, he can customize his cooking set up and make slam-dunk meals. Shaq-etizer, anyone? While the average cook doesn't need to worry about that level of customization, flexibility in design allows you to develop a more creative, pleasant, and useful space. Plus, a cooktop can be placed on virtually any countertop, including islands, so your design options are wide open.

Film is shot at 24 frames per second. And just about every movie disc you can buy is encoded at that speed. DVD, HD DVD, Blu-ray -- all 24 frames per second. Trouble is, television programming runs at 30 frames per second and most TVs conform to that standard. See the problem? Fitting that 24-frame content onto a 30-frame screen isn’t a seamless process. You can’t divide 24 by 30 evenly so video engineers fill in the gaps. Known as 3:2 pulldown, this conversion process spreads out 24 frames into 30 by placing one frame on the screen three times and the next one after that two times, and repeating this pattern again and again and again... which sometimes causes the stutter and other visual artifacts that can ruin the illusion of losing yourself in a great movie.

To further complicate things, some video content is recorded at 60 fps, such as certain modern special effects and computer animations (think Matrix), which tricks the 3:2 pulldown process and trips up transmission of the intended on-screen image.

24, 30, 60... Are you beginning to see the beauty of 120Hz? Grade school math tells you that 120 is a multiple of 24 and 30 and 60. 120Hz image processing shows 120 frames per second, allowing these TVs to reproduce unconverted, evenly extrapolated 24 fps movie, 30 fps television, and 60 fps special effects programming, without the stutter and other clutter of 3:2 pulldown.

To return to the top, a bigger TV is not necessarily a better TV. Without 120Hz image processing, some things will certainly be bigger, but they’ll still be just as blurry - especially on-screen text. Imagine missing the get-away car’s license plate number when watching a murder mystery or not catching the content of those top-secret government documents in a super suspenseful spy flick. Maybe it’s as simple as not being able to read the jersey of the player who made the interception during the big game. No matter what the instance, your TV’s instant of indecision just cost you the crucial bit of information and lost you to the rewind once again. Don’t bother with bigger. Go with better, faster, clearer. Go with 120Hz.