Lamp Life
The life of the lamp that is in your television. This particularly applies to CRT direct-view televisions, CRT rear-projection televisions, projectors and DLP rear-projection televisions. There is no such ‘lamp’ in LCD and Plasma televisions.

Lamp Wattage
The wattage of the lamp that is inside your television. The wattage will directly affect the lumens that your television is capable of displaying. The higher the wattage, the higher the lumens your TV will be able to produce.

Letterbox
Letterbox is the term used for watching a movie in wide screen format on a regular 4:3 aspect ratio television. This viewing format is often accompanied by a black bar on the top and bottom of the screen and a picture that is in the aspect ratio of 16:9.

LIL
Local Into Local. These are stations you receive via a satellite over DirecTV or the Dish Network that are broadcast out of your own local market. LIL is the exact opposite of OOM. Chances are if you can get LIL broadcasts they will be standard definition and not High Definition.

Line Doubler
This is simply a de-interlacer. For instance it could take a 480i picture and double it to 480p, thus taking an interlaced image to progressive. A doubler can also take a 480i image and convert it to 960i, as the 240 lines being shown in 1/60 are the same as showing 480 lines at 1/60 second. Bob is a line doubling technique that repeats the last line to create new lines. Weave is another technique that combines one half the image (here being 240 fields) with the previous or next 240 fields to create a single 480 line frame.

Line Scaler
A scaler is a line doubler that deinterlaces the image and then scales it up to a higher resolution. Many times scalers simply scale up to the native resolution of your display.

LNB
LNB is an acronym for Low Noise Block downconverter. This is a device for satellite TV systems that takes the entire band of microwave frequencies and outputs it as lower frequencies that can be received by a compatible receiver. With DTV you can usually get one of two variations. One is a single LNB and lets you connect one IRD, while a dual LNB will allow you to connect two or more devices. However, you will need to use a multiswitch or multiplexer if you wish to connect more then two devices.

LPTV
stands for Low-power television. LPTV offers true local television coverage and usually comes into play where cable and full-power TV stations are not as readily available. Thus, LPTV tends to serve outlying communities more then anything else. Transmitter output is limited to 1000 watts for UHF, 10 watts for VHF stations, except when VHF operation is on an allocated channel and 100 watts may be used.

Luminance
The white portion of a signal