Author Topic: Looking for new flat panel TV  (Read 27270 times)

texasboy

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Looking for new flat panel TV
« on: July 22, 2007, 06:27:48 am »
 ;D Lots of good bargains out there on 32-42 inch wall mounted flat screen tv`s. Prices are coming down daily.
LCD or Plasma? Personal preference is LCD but need some input. Has Plasma sorted out its problems?
cheers

Offline Quantum

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Re: Looking for new flat panel TV
« Reply #1 on: July 23, 2007, 01:18:54 pm »
LCD = Lower Quality Picture
Plasma = Slightly Smaller Life Span

Both of them = Lower Quality Picture than a big ass CRT if you don't have an HD source for your T.Vs, Sky HD or something you download (HD sources are about 1GB - 1.5 GB for 45 min T.V episode).

They're getting cheaper and cheaper, but unless your willing to pay another subscription to Sky or you have a 360 or PS3, the whole thing is pointless. I'm waiting for Laser T.Vs to come out or LED backlit LCDs, get a high quality one of those when there's actual HD TV.
Daniel: "This tastes like chicken."
Carter: "So what's wrong with it?"
Daniel: "It's macaroni and cheese."

texasboy

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Re: Looking for new flat panel TV
« Reply #2 on: July 24, 2007, 06:51:41 am »
Hi Quantum,
When you say lower quality picture??? When I walk into Laser/Comet even Currys I am amazed at the quality of the pictures on LCD. Fantastic defination and clarity compared to my present digital tv. What am I missing, is it really that bad??
cheers

Offline Quantum

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Re: Looking for new flat panel TV
« Reply #3 on: July 25, 2007, 07:31:36 pm »
Hi Quantum,
When you say lower quality picture??? When I walk into Laser/Comet even Currys I am amazed at the quality of the pictures on LCD. Fantastic defination and clarity compared to my present digital tv. What am I missing, is it really that bad??
cheers

It's all about resolution, a top HD siginal is 1080p, which is: 1920 x 1080, a slightly lower HD signal is 720p which is: 1280 x 720. Apparently most people can't tell the difference between these 2 in a normal living room environment unless the T.V is 65 inches or bigger, personally I can.

Some HD TVs can only display 720p, so check that out before hand. But the real issue is that standard U.K T.V is 576p, which is 720 x 576, now when you stretch 576p to 1080p, especially on a fixed resolution device like a flat screen, you simply get a lower quality picture. The other issue is that LCD in particular is actually a lower quality picture than CRT, this is just fundamental to its technology at the moment, but it is improving a little bit at a time.

In all likelihood, what you see at places like Comet or Currys is an actual HD Movie being played, which requires a computer outputting an HD Signal to it, an HD DVD or Blu Ray Player or a Sky HD subscription (which costs an extra £10 a month on top of a normal subscription, plus it used to cost £300 for the Sky HD Box, but they may have got rid of that extra cost, I'm not sure). Also be aware with Sky HD, there are only a limited number of channels which are actually HD, a couple of the movies, a couple of the sports, a few nature documentary channels, SkyOne HD, BBC HD (very limited stuff on this) and maybe a few more.

Most people take their brand new large flat panel T.V home to find the picture looks almost exactly the same if not a little worse, because they simply haven't done their research and the shops have managed to trick them in to thinking the T.V can magically improve the current picture that they have.
« Last Edit: July 25, 2007, 09:42:13 pm by Quantum »
Daniel: "This tastes like chicken."
Carter: "So what's wrong with it?"
Daniel: "It's macaroni and cheese."

Offline Quantum

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Re: Looking for new flat panel TV
« Reply #4 on: July 25, 2007, 10:03:17 pm »
Yet more limitations of HD. (Warning, the file sizes in these screenshots are actually quite large, about 3 megabytes each. Also the quality of the picture will vary from monitor to monitor, if you have a CRT you bought in the last 4 years and a TFT you bought in the last 2, I'd suggest comparing them so you can see that we've actually taken a step back in quality for saving space)

I'd just like to spend a little time discussing HD, the actual quality of HD in itself can change quite drastically, even if your getting the full 1080p glory.

Here's a screen shot from RAN, an HD DVD movie, this is in 1080p, but as we can see the quality is severely limited by the original source of the movie: http://www.freepicshost.net/pview.php?fid=677&fname=RanPHD2.png

Here's a few shots from the Blu-Ray movie 'House of Flying Daggers', while much touted, the encoders for whatever reason decided to encode it with MPEG2, the old DVD format, this doesn't scale to HD as well as other codecs like VC-1 and h264, so the picture isn't as clear or sharp as it should be:
http://shrani.si/?pdvd013v7tn.png
http://shrani.si/?pdvd011v7tk.png

I've developed a keen eye for spotting stuff encoded in mpeg2, I'm usually about 95% accurate, because it has a sort of fuzzy foggyness about the detail that VC-1 and h264 don't have.



All that aside, some times you do get fine looking movies, take the HD DVD version of Matrix Revolutions, a high quality source, a high quality codec and high bit rate all used. If you played this on a large high quality 1080p T.V this would look fantastic:

http://nwgat.net/woot/files/2/reloadedhddvd/3.png
http://nwgat.net/woot/files/2/reloadedhddvd/7.png
http://nwgat.net/woot/files/2/reloadedhddvd/9.png
http://nwgat.net/woot/files/2/reloadedhddvd/10.png
« Last Edit: July 26, 2007, 01:15:17 am by Quantum »
Daniel: "This tastes like chicken."
Carter: "So what's wrong with it?"
Daniel: "It's macaroni and cheese."

texasboy

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Re: Looking for new flat panel TV
« Reply #5 on: July 26, 2007, 08:45:54 am »
Super info Quantum.
Had been looking at the Sharp LC-42D62U 42" LCD DISPLAY. prices still about £1,100 cheapest but coming down.
cheers

Offline Quantum

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Re: Looking for new flat panel TV
« Reply #6 on: July 26, 2007, 01:47:24 pm »
Super info Quantum.
Had been looking at the Sharp LC-42D62U 42" LCD DISPLAY. prices still about £1,100 cheapest but coming down.
cheers

Sharp do fantastic LCD monitors and having a quick browse over the specs of that, it's good stuff. It's perfect if you know what you're getting yourself in to. Don't know if it supports 1:1 pixel mapping though.
Daniel: "This tastes like chicken."
Carter: "So what's wrong with it?"
Daniel: "It's macaroni and cheese."

MinLo

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Re: Looking for new flat panel TV
« Reply #7 on: July 26, 2007, 06:49:51 pm »
Hi Quantum,
When you say lower quality picture??? When I walk into Laser/Comet even Currys I am amazed at the quality of the pictures on LCD. Fantastic defination and clarity compared to my present digital tv. What am I missing, is it really that bad??
cheers

It's all about resolution, a top HD siginal is 1080p, which is: 1920 x 1080, a slightly lower HD signal is 720p which is: 1280 x 720. Apparently most people can't tell the difference between these 2 in a normal living room environment unless the T.V is 65 inches or bigger, personally I can.

Some HD TVs can only display 720p, so check that out before hand. But the real issue is that standard U.K T.V is 576p, which is 720 x 576, now when you stretch 576p to 1080p, especially on a fixed resolution device like a flat screen, you simply get a lower quality picture. The other issue is that LCD in particular is actually a lower quality picture than CRT, this is just fundamental to its technology at the moment, but it is improving a little bit at a time.

In all likelihood, what you see at places like Comet or Currys is an actual HD Movie being played, which requires a computer outputting an HD Signal to it, an HD DVD or Blu Ray Player or a Sky HD subscription (which costs an extra £10 a month on top of a normal subscription, plus it used to cost £300 for the Sky HD Box, but they may have got rid of that extra cost, I'm not sure). Also be aware with Sky HD, there are only a limited number of channels which are actually HD, a couple of the movies, a couple of the sports, a few nature documentary channels, SkyOne HD, BBC HD (very limited stuff on this) and maybe a few more.

Most people take their brand new large flat panel T.V home to find the picture looks almost exactly the same if not a little worse, because they simply haven't done their research and the shops have managed to trick them in to thinking the T.V can magically improve the current picture that they have.

Interesting information Quantum........

texasboy

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Re: Looking for new flat panel TV
« Reply #8 on: July 27, 2007, 06:48:56 am »
 ;D No doubt MinLo,opens your eyes to stats, I`m sure every family requirements are different.
1)average cornation/eastenders viewer
2) larger family that have children who want to play their games on the bigger screen
3) serious gamers
4)dvd and movie downloaders

Thanks for input on Sharp Quantum. Any friends at moss side markets.lol
cheers

Jake4742

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Re: Looking for new flat panel TV
« Reply #9 on: August 26, 2007, 12:22:30 am »
Flat panel tv's are awesome

Offline TheNightWatchman

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Re: Looking for new flat panel TV
« Reply #10 on: September 01, 2007, 02:38:50 pm »
I watched Casino Royale blu-ray (through PS3) on a 60" Sony Bravia Plasma 1080p... it looked REALLY good. With HD those TVs are really worth in my opinion. Problem is, not even FoxTel (sky equiv.) here is in HD... so you watch a DVD or normal TV with a TV that big... it looks terrible!

I agree Quantum that some movies have yet to catch up encoding wise on HD, but it won't be long until that is there.

I also don't understand why anyone supports HD DVD (well except paramount... with the "incentive" they got).

I've never actually seen HD on a 32" screen though... Those don't seem to bad for SD either because they're small?

Offline Quantum

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Re: Looking for new flat panel TV
« Reply #11 on: September 01, 2007, 10:42:08 pm »
I watched Casino Royale blu-ray (through PS3) on a 60" Sony Bravia Plasma 1080p... it looked REALLY good. With HD those TVs are really worth in my opinion. Problem is, not even FoxTel (sky equiv.) here is in HD... so you watch a DVD or normal TV with a TV that big... it looks terrible!

I agree Quantum that some movies have yet to catch up encoding wise on HD, but it won't be long until that is there.

I also don't understand why anyone supports HD DVD (well except paramount... with the "incentive" they got).

I've never actually seen HD on a 32" screen though... Those don't seem to bad for SD either because they're small?

HD DVD is cheaper to make and has cheaper players, primarily uses higher quality codecs, supports Picture in Picture, has compulsory Ethernet port at the back of the HD DVD for firmware updates.

Blu-Ray has a lot of its movies in mpeg2, which is lower quality and negates its larger file size capacity. Also BD Java is being updated at the end of the year to such a specification that new Blu-Ray movies might not work on some old Blu-Ray players.

So far I'm well in to the HD DVD band camp.

I watch HD on my 19 inch computer monitor, so lol, I guess.
« Last Edit: September 02, 2007, 12:14:40 am by Quantum »
Daniel: "This tastes like chicken."
Carter: "So what's wrong with it?"
Daniel: "It's macaroni and cheese."

Offline Synbios

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Re: Looking for new flat panel TV
« Reply #12 on: September 02, 2007, 04:24:16 am »
Don't get an HDTV if you're going to be playing standard (480 or 576) on it. I just got a 32' CRT from LG and the picture looks beautiful when I run 1080i or 720p, but as soon as I play some standard material, it looks worse than my 10 year old trinitron!

Offline Quantum

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Re: Looking for new flat panel TV
« Reply #13 on: September 02, 2007, 09:57:33 am »
Don't get an HDTV if you're going to be playing standard (480 or 576) on it. I just got a 32' CRT from LG and the picture looks beautiful when I run 1080i or 720p, but as soon as I play some standard material, it looks worse than my 10 year old trinitron!

Quality of standard definition is very dependent on the way your T.V scales. CRTs are by far the easiest to make standard definition look good because they can be built to output at multiple different resolutions, where as on a TFT you are mapping one resolution to another, CRTs are also quite forgiving in terms of low quality picture as they tend to 'fuzz' it up a little to produce a higher quality than it actually is.

I'd check your manual to make sure there isn't a special setting for Standard Definition, otherwise that's unfortunately what you get with some HD TVs.
Daniel: "This tastes like chicken."
Carter: "So what's wrong with it?"
Daniel: "It's macaroni and cheese."

Offline Synbios

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Re: Looking for new flat panel TV
« Reply #14 on: September 03, 2007, 04:43:58 am »
I tried looking through the manual and I can't seem to find anything. Right now I have a DVI->HDMI cable going from my computer to the TV. My old setup was a S-video cable going to the trinitron.

Maybe it's because I'm running SD through HDMI that the TV is getting confused. I'm going to try and hookup a standard DVD player with S-video eventually and see what that looks like.

The LG makes the SD material look really fuzzy as you said. The trinitron was a lot sharper.