Video Asylum

Posted by Joe Murphy Jr (A) on August 15, 2006 at 18:26:15

In Reply to: Joe Murphy . . . posted by townsend on August 15, 2006 at 17:27:59:

Go to the nearest Best Buy or Circuit City, but it may take going to a specialty store to do this. Ask to talk to the manager or the "person in control" of the display department. Explain to them that you are interested in buying a plasma, but you're concerned about the picture quality from DVDs. You've seen the feed from the Hi-Def sources, but since the majority of your viewing will be DVDs from your movie collection, the picture quality from this source will have the most influence on your decision. Then ask if they will allow you to bring a few DVDs from your collection (no porn, which is excellent on a plasma by the way, at least not during store hours) and your DVD player. Chances are they will probably not be too accomodating with the DVD player request, but should be able to hook up a decent player to a few plasmas for you. The personal DVDs should not be a problem as I doubt they will have "open box" DVDs for you to use and you would really want to do your evaluation based on content that you are familiar with. Try to set this up for when the store first opens so you can have time to evaluate the displays and are allowed to change the displays settings to get the best picture. If they aren't willing to do this for you, they aren't worth buying from in the first place.

HDMI v1.3 should not be a concern for displays or DVD players. DVD players can't take advantage of what v1.3 offers and current sources won't be able to take advantage of the color and bandwidth advancements that are planned. HDMI v1.3 is needed for Blu-Ray and HD DVD players so that DTS-HD and Dolby TrueHD can be sent in their compressed state to a surround receiver/processor capable of decoding these compressed streams. Unfortunately, despite what I just said, v1.3 will be needed by these components if downstream components not v1.3 will drop capability down to the lower level of HDMI. For instance, if you have a v1.3 Blu-ray player and feed it via HDMI to a surround receiver that's v1.3, but the display downstream is v1.0, how will that affect the chain? Does everything default to v1.0? Or will Blu-ray to receiver be v1.3 and receiver to display be v1.0?Logically, the lower level HDMI device should not influence the data exchange between the higher level HDMI devices, but that may not be the case. I don't think hdmi.org has fully clarified that yet.

Re: 1920x1080 plasmas, see my original comments on availability and pricing.