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In Reply to: Just bought our first wide-screen LCD TV--and we hate it posted by bigi on September 1, 2005 at 02:46:04:
Provided you can do without a flat panel and shallow depth to the cabinet, plasmas, LCDs or any other fixed pixel technology will not come close to an old fashion CRT tv. I would personally opt for a CRT tv over any other alternative unless I needed a screen much larger than 34".
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I suggest you take a look at plasmas from Panasonic. The best black levels in the non-CRT part of the display industry and very close to CRT. Now available up to 65".
I like the Panasonic and Fujitsu plasmas. They do have quite good black levels, but, not nearly as good as a CRT. CRTs manage to get good black levels AND good detail in dark areas of the screen, while a lot of plasmas cheat a little with the gamma curve to get a darker picture at some cost in detail. But, as I said, plasmas are quite good.My issue with plasmas lie elsewhere. To get the theater experience one needs a very big plasma or to sit relatively close to the screen. Neither works well with plasmas because the pixel structure becomes very annoying. That is true with a 34" CRT as well, but I find MP3 artifacts (mosquito noise, blockiness, etc) more annoying with fixed pixel devices than with CRTs.
I wish there were an ideal display device that combined all of the strengths of the best technologies and none of the weaknesses. I have the Qualia 006 rear projection set. It is, in my opinion, the best such set available, but it too, has many problems. Chief among the problems is "false contouring" which manifests itself as blotchy patches in dark solid areas of the picture in low light scenes, particularly problematic with low resolution source material. While this is an issue with all digital display devices, it seems to be particularly annoying with this set. It seems that the better a set looks with good material, the worse it performs with bad source material. I think CRTs perform with better with bad sources than do other technologies.
This is a direct result of not enough bits in signal processing. Early plasmas and, believe it or not, many of today's DLP displays use 8-bit processing (you may have heard of the DLP "clay face" issues). In order to diminish this effect, many digital display manufacturers upped the bit count to 10-bit processing. This helped quite a bit (if you'll excuse the pun), but it still isn't enough with some signals. There are a few 12-bit processing displays around and they nearly eliminate all of the dithering/noise/false contouring problems.Beginning in Q4 2005/Q1 2006, Panasonic will introduce 14-bit video processing technology for their new plasmas. Panasonic currently offers three 65" plasma models, but they are 1366x768. Scheduled for Q4 2005/Q1 2006 is a new 65" model with full HD 1920x1080 resolution and it will use this new 14-bit processing technology. The only problem is that, like nearly all displays today, it will not accept 1080p via HDMI and will be limited to 1080i/720p HDMI input bandwidth. However, by Q3/Q4 2006, Panasonic will offer at least one model (possibly two) capable of full HD 1920x1080 resolution and 1080p HDMI input.
My Qualia uses 12 bit processing, but, this is still a major problem when the source itself, particularly my cable feed, is limited in quality. I suspect that the fact that it is very noticeable on my set is the product of a very large image (I do sit a bit close) and a lot of "detail" of what is essentially noise (the set has a true 1920 x 1080 resolution capability).I don't know why, but Sony also chose not to offer any inputs capable of accepting 1920 x 1080p, which is the native resolution of the set. I am looking into external processors and scalers (Algolith Mosquito and Dragonfly), and it would have been nice to bypass the Qualias scaler completely by going 1080p 60.
You may want to get the display checked out, just to be safe. Rich Harkness wrote a rather long and detailed review of a Sony Qualia 70" model in the Plasma and Flat Panel LCD Displays section of AVS Forum. He did not give the impression that the Sony had any problems with SD signals or false contouring. At least not anything that stood out in his comparison of the display to the 65" Panasonic plasma. If your Sony does indeed use 12-bit processing, noise and false contouring should be nearly eliminated.Many manufacturers have been remiss about 1080p input and it's a mistake. Sony's excuse was that it had to do with copy protection. What? Who did they think they were kidding? The HDCP encryption process has nothing to do with the resolution of the signal. Absolutely nothing: what a joke. Other manufacturers' main excuse was that there is no 1080p content. Seems rather retarded, as 1080p content will be available with the next gen discs in about 6 months. They're selling sets that will be obsolete very shortly in the sense that they will not be able to take full advantage of what the next gen format will offer. Or maybe it's just that they want to offer "new and improved" displays for people to buy in about 6 months (just look at those silly DLP 960x1080 MMDs being sold -- still called "1080p" displays -- that will shortly be replaced by TI's new DLP 1920x1080 MMDs)? Or maybe they didn't want to up the $3 additional cost for the HDMI receiver chip that accepts 1080p? Whatever. I wouldn't buy a 1920x1080 display that didn't accept a 1080p signal via a digital (HDMI and/or DVI) input.
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