Q: What is the best way to hook my laptop up to my TV?

Image Credit: Alan Levine / Flickr

A: Thinking of cutting the cord, Aaron? With Netflix and Hulu Plus you can get most of the shows you watch on TV without cable. Or maybe you want to use your TV to show the baby videos stored on your laptop? Either way there are a few options.

If you have an HDMI port on both your laptop and your TV, the simplest approach may be to connect them using an HDMI cable. Most, but not all, laptops now support HDMI and virtually every modern TV does. A word of caution: don’t go to your local big box store to buy HDMI cables – they are way overpriced! You can find them online for literally a quarter of the price (we’re talking $10 vs. $40).

Once you have a cable connecting both the laptop and the TV, you need to select the HDMI input on your television. Then, if you are using a PC, you may have to tell your laptop to send the signal to the TV. This is usually accomplished by pressing the “function” or “FN” key and one of the F keys at the top of the keyboard.

Now, if you don’t want to cover your living room with HDMI cables, there are also a lot of wireless solutions out there. However, your choices depend on what kind of laptop you have and what you want to do with it. For instance, Intel has a very nice bit of technology to mirror your PC or Mac called WiDi (which stands for “Wireless Display”). Unfortunately it is not very widely available, and typically you’ll only find it on high-end Intel laptops.

Several manufacturers also make small boxes which enable wireless streaming from your laptop to your television. Apple TV and Roku are two of the most widely known. Either one can stream from a Mac or PC, and from Netflix, Hulu Plus and a variety of other services. They each cost around $100 (depending on which version of the Roku you buy). If we were answering your question six months ago, we would tell you to get one of these.

You see, there’s now another solution that’s a lot cheaper. Google sells a small gadget called the Chromecast which plugs into the HDMI port on your TV. It then connects to your home WiFi network. Once it’s set up, you can stream video from your laptop through the Google Chrome browser (it supports YouTube, Netflix, Hulu Plus and Pandora), and it will mirror any page you have open in the browser. And here’s kicker: it’s only $30.

However, you should know that there are some limitations. Since the Chromecast only streams what you can view through the Chrome browser, it most likely won’t work with video you have stored locally on your hard drive. So, it may not be the best solution if you are looking to show off your baby videos.

But, again, for $30 it may be worth a shot. If it doesn’t work out, there’s always the HDMI cable.

Q: I am thinking about getting a TV for our apartment for Christmas. The question is, how big should it be? I would like a bigger TV, but our apartment is pretty small.

Image Credit: Robert Scoble / Flickr

A: Smart question, Ryan. There are actually recommended guidelines for how large your TV should be depending on how far you sit away from it. If you are really hankering for a larger TV, we’ve got great news for you: you can probably get a much bigger TV than you would have expected!

For example, the average person sits about nine feet away from their television. For a “truly immersive viewing experience,” home theater experts THX recommend that person purchase a 90-inch TV! That may sound a little excessive, unless you’re going for the true “home theater” experience. The Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, on the other hand, recommend the slightly more conservative range of 65-70 inches (which is still a pretty good size, in our opinion).

There’s a simple formula to calculate how big your TV should be based on how far you will be sitting away from it. The minimum TV size should be your distance from the screen in inches divided by three. The maximum is the distance divided by one and a half. So, if you are sitting 10 feet from your screen, take 120 inches and divide it by three to get the minimum recommended TV size of 40 inches. 120 inches divided by one and a half will give you your maximum TV size of 80 inches.

Now, of course, these are only recommendations. You can certainly get a smaller or larger TV and still watch it just fine. A good way to see how different size TVs will look in your space is to take a piece of cardboard, cut it to the size of the TV you’re looking at, and place it on your wall. Remember that the size of the TV is actually a measurement of the diagonal length of the screen. Also remember that modern flat screen televisions have a length to width ratio of 16:9.

Another factor you should consider when shopping is what resolution you would like the TV to have. The resolution is basically how many pixels the picture on your screen is made up of. The two most common options are 720p and 1080p. Most people assume that the higher resolution the better, which is true, but depending on certain factors a higher resolution may not always be necessary. For example, if your TV screen is small or far away from where you are sitting, the pixels are already pretty small. The difference between 720p and 1080p may not even be noticeable in this case, so you should probably save yourself some money and get the cheaper, lower resolution one.

There are also new 4K TVs that are said to have four times the resolution of 1080p televisions. While we’re sure these look great, we will say that unless you have one of the largest screens your living room will allow, your eye may not be able to physically distinguish the difference between a 4K TV and a regular one. Plus, as of right now, there’s hardly any 4K content available.

So, if you’re looking for a TV to put in your bedroom, a 42-inch 720p screen may work fine for you. For most living room situations, you’re more likely going to want a 1080p television that is 50 inches or larger. 4K TVs are probably overkill unless your living room is enormous.

But hey, maybe you think we’re crazy and you’re going to get a 4K TV anyway. Feel free to invite us over so we can check it out for ourselves. We’ll bring popcorn and nachos!