We already knew this was coming, but now we have actual pics that give a better sense of its scale.

Philips introduced its new Cinema 21:9 TV with a wider-than-widescreen display at a press event in London. ...

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The Super Bowl is one of the must-watch TV events of the year, and it can be a complete viewing experience.

On The Early Show on Tuesday, CNET TV Senior Editor Natali Del Conte presented super ways to make watching the big game as good as it can be for the serious living-room fan, showcasing some high-tech gadgets providing premiere ways to watch.

She also showed those who don't want to purchase anything how to make the best of what they already have:

The serious splurge: Panasonic 65-inch Premiere
This model is the Ferrari of televisions, and it only began shipping last week. It is sold only through really high-end retailers, and it cannot yet be ordered online. It has a professional studio-quality monitor and the richest black detail of any TV on the market. The plasma technology offers clear motion reproduction, deeper blacks, and a wider viewing angle.

Price: $9,995

There is no CNET review yet for this model.

The more affordable: Vizio 37-inch television
This model is not only affordable for a flat-panel TV, it gets great reviews from technology sites and magazines. It has accurate gray-scale and primary colors. This model also has one of the most important things that you should always look for in an HDTV--more than one HDMI port. This one has three, in fact, as well as one PC output. If you are looking for a solid and advanced LCD at a decent price, this is it.

Price: $730 ...

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The displays of the world are getting wider. For those of us who work, this is not progress. Sure, wide-screen computer screens look cool, but in the real world of working on laptops, a wide-screen display is an ergonomic step backwards.

Before I slam the move to wide-screen computers, I will gladly admit that for entertainment content, wide-screen works. Our eyes are side-by-side, after all, and having a story unfold in a way that more closely respects how we see gives a more engrossing, absorbing experience. Wide-screen plasma and LCD television sets make sense, as do CinemaScope movie theaters.

But when we have work to do, the fact that our eyes are set up to spot a herd of jackals approaching us over the plain becomes irrelevant. For most people, the world of work is in portrait mode, and wide-screen displays offer scant benefits.

Like reading a page of text or a book, most Web sites are set up with strong vertical orientation. That works for text-based material, since wide lines of text, longer than about 60 characters, become hard to read (the reader has a hard time finding the beginning of the next line).

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A few years ago, this wouldn't have happened. It would have been unthinkable, too terrible even to imagine. No, a few years ago, I never would have missed the season premiere of Lost.

So imagine my surprise when my boyfriend and I were minding our own business, watching our previously recorded Top Chef two nights ago, when, during a commercial break we were barreling through in fast forward, I happened to catch the words "Lost returns tonight." Stop. Rewind. What?

We backed up to the beginning of the ad, and sure enough, Bravo HD was proclaiming that Lost had returned a few hours before!

Had we set it to record? No. Had we even known it was coming back this week? No! We don't watch ads anymore. Ever. But without them, we are apparently living in a dark age so backwards it's as though TV Guide hasn't been invented yet. Now my grandpa is more informed than I am about television culture.

If we didn't have a DVR, we surely would have known, because I bet Lost ads have dominated the airwaves for the past few months. Lost isn't a show to announce itself softly: it usually has weeks of setup, marathons of previous seasons, call-in shows, etc. If we didn't have the ability to fast forward through that dreck, we would have known to be home, in front of the TV, at 8 p.m. on Wednesday. Sure, we would also have been brain-washed by a desire for a Snuggie and Wendy's new chicken sandwich, but information comes at a cost. As Tina Fey would say, "a doy."

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Contrast ratio should be black and white. Taken at face value, it's the ratio of the light level (luminance) the display produces when fed a white signal to the luminance when it's fed a black signal. Unfortunately, it's probably the most misused, inflated, and ultimately misleading specification used to describe HDTVs today.

At the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show, manufacturers quoted contrast ratio specs of 1,000,000:1 or 2,000,000:1 for upcoming LED-based LCD displays (Vizio and LG, respectively), which are similar to the specs quoted by Samsung and Sony for their current LED models. Those numbers sure do sound impressive, but what do they mean in the real world?

Very little. It's true that in general, a higher contrast ratio can indicate that the display produces a deeper level of black, with all of the picture-quality benefits that brings--but then again it might not. Despite the million-to-one contrast ratios of the Samsung and Sony LED sets we reviewed, we observed better black-level performance in the Pioneer PRO-111FD. Pioneer doesn't publish a contrast ratio spec for that television, but has claimed that its black levels are so deep as to be "immeasurable."

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