Video Asylum

Posted by petew (A) on April 04, 2002 at 09:51:57

In Reply to: Re: HDTV, Flat Panel, Wide Screen, Plasma, - need some help posted by petew on April 04, 2002 at 07:56:52:

since I'm such a nasty guy i thought i'd post some more on this.

where to begin? chris, you are asking us to tell you everything we think about televisions between 36 and 50 inches. whew! that would take me dozens, perhaps a hundred hours to distill, synthesise, edit and post, or you could just spend some time with the search engine. but no, it's easier for you to ask us to do all the work.

just think how hard it is to answer: "what is the BEST loudspeaker?"

this is a typical newbe question.

well, are you looking at dynamic or planar? electrostatic or magnotronic? do you plan to listen mostly to rock or voice and piano? is your amp tube or SS?...get the idea? you should know better.

look how hard this is: say you decided to limit yourself to one category of television, the conventional cathode ray tube direct-view.

now going from brand to brand, in say, just the 36" sizes, you'd have to see them side by side being fed exactly the same signal via the same lenght of cable and connections, and even then, hope that the factory calibration of the set is equal in each case. When you go into a video store and see a wall of televisions, how the hell are you to know which has "the best possible picture?" it could very well be that it's the one with the worst looking picture, and all it needs is to be re-calibrated to some video standard and fed a signal that hasn't been attenuated by the other 50 televisions in the chain.

you know that. what do you expect us to say?

how about this: how far away will you be sitting?

because if you're gonna be closer than 10 feet, maybe you should stick with the CRT sets. They are less expensive, are HDTV capable, often have a built-in Directv tuner, and look fabulous up close. if you get too close to a plasma you'll start seeing the individual pixells.

but you can't move the 36" sets yourself, so you'd better be sure you won't have to get behind it to adjust your wires (you most certainly will) and if you plan to put it between your expensive audio speakers then you were a fool to spend 15K on them, because your imaging is goint to hell.

so for CRTs: pros: cheap, excellent HDTV capable picture , built-in tuners, relyable established technology. cons: very heavy, bulky, limited picture size.

rear projection: pros: very cheap, big picture, HDTV capable. cons: the worst picture quality, heavy, very bulky, must view head-on from more distant position than CRT.

LCD: dead in the water...good for computer monitors

front projection: since you limit picture size to 50" it would be foolish to even think about this technology.

plasma: pros: best picture quality, relatively light for screen size, takes up no space and looks nice when not in use, has best color spectrum, has best 3-D "looking through a window" effect, won't muck-up audio image, very cool, very high WAF. cons: doesn't do black, most expensive, no tuner, long-term reliability unknown, easily portable: people will break into your house to get it, subject to burn-out if you watch network TV (the static network logos in the bottom right of your screen will permanently burn into the picture).

the aspect-ratio question is simple: you definitely want a 16:9 set.
these sets have a built-in scaler that will expand the 4:3 ratio NTSC programming to fill the screen, and zoom in on widescreen programming to shrink the black bars on the top and bottom of the display. you will like this. sure, there's some weird stretching at the edges of the anamorphic scaler that have some very funny consequences when the actor sticks her butt or shoulder over there. i find this effect very amusing. or, you can have the "Graduate" effect of the 4:3 sets: I remember watching the classic film "The Graduate" for the first time on TV: In the classic scene the first time Dustan takes Anne Bancroft to the hotel room, all you see is his nose and a bit of her kneee. is that what you like? or perhaps you would like to see the whole widescreen view, only on a 42" 4:3 set the image would be about 4 inches tall.

if you buy a 4:3 set you will hate yourself.

HDTV is pretty awesome. you ought to see it for yourself. i recommend you view the free off-the-air broadcast that you can get with just a simple UHF antenna, as this is the best 1080i signal I've seen. I didn't care for the satellite HD network.

the 37" and 42" plasmas are not HDTV capable because they are fixed-pixell displays and do not have enough horizontal lines to meet the specifications. you can read more about this on the plasmatvbuyingguide website.

are there some people who do it better than others? yes. plasma has some problems, and the early technolgy gave it a bad reputation. Panasonic has addressed these issues better than anyone else, but the latest generation of sets, particularly by NEC are catching up. Some of the brands are just a repackaging of screens and or electronics made by the big boys in the game. you should search the web--there's alot written about this. keep in mind that if what you are reading is more than a few months old then it's probably out of date. plasma technology is moving very fast. it's hot!

i could go on, but imagine you're pretty pissed-off by now, and I know there are thousands of people waiting to answer all your questions, and do it without you imagining they are making fun of you.