Video Asylum

Posted by Rich H (R) on May 20, 2002 at 20:06:40

In Reply to: Re: Why is Plasma better??? posted by img on May 20, 2002 at 20:06:27:

I'm basically an audio guy too :-)

Sorry, but I'm not in a good position to enlighten anyone in regards to plasma performance with cable/sat. Mine is so new I haven't even had it installed yet. So, I have not hooked it up to my cable box (I'm going to experiment with cable vs sat at some point). I have seen quite a few plasmas run with cable and SD and the pictures were all over the map. Some poor, some good, some great, depending on the station signal. Frankly I hate digital compression artifacts more than analog distortions. A local store has the Panasonic plasmas (mine model included) hooked up to cable and they look pretty good. I can say that, unlike many of the "digital/HDTV-ready" CRTs I've seen, the Panasonic plasmas don't seem to add annoying digital artifacts to the signal. It all depends on the signal itself.

I'm very curious how my cable is going to look on my plasma. However, as you noted, I bought the thing to watch movies on DVD, as I do not watch much broadcast TV at all. So, for me if I loose some signal quality on broadcast the compromise is still worth it.

Of course, I have hooked up my DVD player to the plasma and run through most of my DVD collection...entranced. I was very happy to find that the little qualms I had with this plasma in the show room (I thought I'd spotted pixelation here, softness there, poor de-interlacing there) are virtually absent in my home. Combined with my Panny RP-91 DVD player I just cannot believe how clean, sharp, smooth and artifact-free the image is - like nothing I've seen before.

Best of luck on your plasma education :-)

Rich.