LCD or Plasma

Definitely an LCD in this case then. Plasmas tend to have relatively short life spans (5 years or less), and watching sports where certain areas of the screen will no really change much (if at all) over a decent amount of time, will result in serious cases of burn-in. I've heard of it happening in a single Baseball/Football game.

 

yeah, if the image is stationary on the plasma for to long (like a video game) then there will be a pretty bad burn in. Look up some of the horror stories and then decide

 

The best picture is going to have a lot to do with the specs of the TV, in relation to what you feed into it.

If you have high-def TV, remember there are two flavors - 720p and 1080i. A 1080i TV can display all the detail of a 720p picture, although it 'scales' it, which degrades picture quality. A 720p TV cannot display the detail of a 1080i levels of detail.

When I say a 720p or 1080i TV, I am not talking about what the salesman says it will support, I'm talking about the actual resolution of the TV. Most LCD's and Plasmas run something like 1024x768 or `300x768 resolution, and you simply cannot display a ~1300x1080 picture on that number of pixels without dropping out some data.

Walmart had a nice 42" native 1900x1080 TV - I dont know if it was plasma or LCD - but I believe it was $$1800 - VERY good price for that kind of unit.

EDIT: Check this link out

http://www.walmart.com/catalog/product.do?product_id=5006894

They also had a 42" I think Philips for $1800 but I dont see it anymore - maybe sold out. The link above is a true 1900x1080 which will always look much superior to a 1300x768 display, IMO unless you watch almost all sports which may be better on a 768 display.

I think Plasmas have gotten better in terms of burn in and lifespan over the past 5 years. Actually I am not even sure burn in and life are even an issue anymore, are they? The first generation units had issues with that, but later ones I haven't heard that they have. Plasmas generally look better, IMO, sharper and quicker and more contrast.

 

What model plasma do you own? Have YOU experienced this?

In my experience most of negatives of plasmas are written by people who've never owned one.

I'm going on 6 years now on a Pioneer Elite 50" plasma(PRO1000HD), I have watched innumerable hours of ball games and boxing and played Xbox(admittedly never more than an hour at a time) on it. Not one sign of burn in or screen fade. Not one problem period. The monitor has been a champ. I've also had the newer model Elites. My 1130 elicited a "pop" after 3 weeks and was pronounced dead. My local store and Pioneer replaced it with a new unit in 24hrs, that 1130 then ran flawlessly till replaced. My 1140 has been flawless so far and I'm sure the FHD1 that's replacing it for Christmas will be perfect as well. My experience with Pioneer has been wonderful and they've earned a customer for life. The new monitors at ever falling prices are a real bargain.


Ken, for the money you're looking to spend LCD is probably the way to go. Like ANY monitor, the picture is only as good as what it's fed and your ability to control ambient lighting.

Also, have a look around www.avsforum.com

 

1080i or 1080P?

 

P

 

So much also has to do with source material (and with how the display device is calibrated). And, a TV demo in a store is usually misleading, unless your viewing room is full of fluorescent light, and has 20 other TV sets running simultaneously. Usually, store demos which 'pop' are artificially too bright under critical viewing conditions. I do find the plasma tvs to look a bit too artificial, at least compared to high quality front projection. LCDs, on the other hand, have gotten bigger, and better, but still have problems off-axis, ie, if you are not looking at the image straight on.
THe "P" is progressive scan, the "i" interlaced- the latter only lights up the designated scanning lines alternately, so, theoretically, an "i" measure will have 1/2 the resolution of a "P" device. Again, the specs on paper are not necessarily going to tell you what set looks best. I'd also suggest you take a look at the AVS Forum.
Anybody here actually buy an HD/Blu Ray player? Any real programming for it yet?

PS> here's a pretty simplistic article describing the differences in the context of HD TV.http://techdigs.net/content/view/53/42/

And, here is a terrific piece which, while focusing on players, has great demos of the differences:
http://www.hometheaterhifi.com/volume_7_4/dvd-benchmark-part-5-progressive-10-2000.html

 

Nope, they are the same.

There are no LCD/Plasma 'i' sets, and there is nothing broadcast in 1080p.... so nobody is watching "1080p", they are watching 1080i de-interlaced and displayed in a progressive format. AFAIK, the only sets that actually output 1080i are CRT projection units.

People like TV's that support 1080p, because P is superior to I, but there is no 1080p content, probably will not be for a looooong time, if ever, and by the time there IS anything in 1080p, if ever, then any TV bought now will be way way obsolete.

No sense in paying a nickel more for 1080p over 1080i.

 

This has been mentioned before, but purchase your TV from Costco if you're able to. They have a lifetime return policy, which is HUGE when purchasing a TV of this caliber. After the holidays there should be some great deals on them.

 

I don't know if this means anything to anyone, but the Panasonics were ranked no 1 by Consumer Reports and Audiophile magazine. I went into a Circuit City and saw many of the best brands and would have to say the Panasonic was among the best. I thought it was better than the Sony, too. But I couldn't quote you model no's. I can say that Panasonic just came out with a 65 that initially was $15k, but now sells for $7k on Costco.com. Remember, the smaller the screen the sharper the image. I haven't seen it yet, but am very interested in it. I was at their store today and apparently it's a special order only--no surprise.

 

Bill, the 1080i vs. 1080p 'half resolution' thing is a common misconception. There is no LCD or plasma TV that displays anything in interlaced. They all paint the picture from top to bottom, one sequential line at a time. Also, every LCD or plasma has a frame buffer - like a video card in a computer. The processor sends the picture to the buffer, and 60 times per second, the buffer is flushed to the screen.

In a 1080i setup, the processor in the TV paints the buffer in two steps, first even lines, then odd. Once it's painted the whole buffer, then the image gets flushed to the screen. What the user is actually seeing is 1080p, at 30Hz. The screen updates twice per second, so basically the see Frame A, Frame A, Frame B, Frame B, Frame C, Frame C, and so on. If there was such a thing as 1080p (which there is no broadcast of, nor content stored in, neither HD-DVD or BluRay), then it would be FrameA, FrameB, FrameC. The resolution would be identical, the difference would be how quickly the screen updated. It's like if you have a CRT monitor and turn the refresh down to 45hz, you see it flicker, whereas at 75hz you can't.

The misconception that people have is that some "low quality" de-interlacers will send the even lines, then the odd lines. This would produce 1080 at 60Hz, but with 540 lines per refresh. In actuality, I have never seen or heard of a TV that actually does this. Maybe one does exist, but IMO it would be like getting a bug in software - it would be a mistake that no sane company would actually put out there as a product. I think some of the AV guys have invented a scenario that I am not sure has ever occurred, or really could even occur.

Bluray and HD-DVD are both 1080i, and of course on a 1080p screen (or any LCD or plasma), that 1080i/60Hz signal will be de-interlaced and output to the TV in 1080p/30Hz.

People figure that since P is better than I, they ought to get a P screen for some upcoming upgrade that will provide 1080p content. I don't think that will happen anytime soon. The bandwidth is far beyond what HDMI can handle, and is beyond the fastest image processing chips available today. I also think the frequency the cables would need to run at would cause problems - they may not even be able to handle it, so perhaps some new interconnect specification would need to be developed. And since 1080p/60 content would be twice as big as 1080i content, it would not fit on Bluray disks, or HD-DVD discs, even dual layer ones. And the movie studios would all need to buy new cameras, and new editing computers, etc, etc. I think there is only one or two 1080p cameras in existence and I believe they are hundreds of thousands of $$.

So, in short, I don't think 1080p is going to become a format that gets used anytime soon - probably not even within 10 years. If they were going to the hassle of going to a new format, why not go beyond 1080? Imaging sensors are better than what we can handle in the broadcast medium, so by the time they were to upgrade everything, 2080p may be viable?

IMO buying a 1080p TV today is not a bad thing, but not worth spending $$ on and would be comparable to buying one of the first electric cars - they were good feats of innovation but were never going to become the standard.

 

LoL, what a coincidence. I was just about to create a thread asking for recommendations on a new TV I will be buying soon. I was at Best Buy earlier and was drooling over what might be the same TV you were. Was it this one?

http://www.sonystyle.com/is-bin/+INTERSHOP.enfinity/eCS/Store/en/-/USD/SY_DisplayProductInformation-Start?ProductSKU=KDL46XBR3&Dept=tvvideo&CategoryName=tv_flatpanel_46to52

The picture quality was amazing, plus it was the best looking TV they had IMO, with the black finish & glass frame. It is on the pricy side, especially if you go up 6" and get the 52", which had a pricetag of about $6,500 (slightly better prices than Sony has listed on their website).

 

I'm sorry Mike. I meant within the Plasma TV world, the larger the screen the duller and less sharp the image. I witnessed this myslef as I looked at a 42 vs a 50 inch of the same manufacturer. You are far further down the knowledge line than I am so I'm going to lean on you.

What are your thoughts on DVD's or Satellite providers broadcasting in this higher range, 1080i or p. I was preparing to buy a Hitachi 73inch TV with a hard drive, but have since changed my mind to plasma. But I want big for my theater room where my Macintosh equipment lies idle waiting to glow. I have seen the Panasonic 50inch, but the 65 has received incredible reviews and I don't want to have any regrets. I'll see if I can find the link and I'll edit this post shortly and add it.

Thoughts...

HERE WE GO...

http://www.costco.com/Browse/Product.aspx?Prodid=11114378&search=plasma&Sp=S&Mo=38&cm_re=1-_-Top_Left_Nav-_-Top_search&Nr=P_CatalogName:BC&Ns=P_Price|1||P_SignDesc1&N=0&whse=BC&Dx=mode+matchallpartial&Ntk=All&Dr=P_CatalogName:BC&Ne=4000000&D=plasma&Ntt=plasma&No=0&Ntx=mode+matchallpartial&Nty=1&topnav=&s=1

BY THE WAY, COSTCO GUARANTEES EVERYTHING IT SELLS OR YOUR MONEY BACK. TRY THAT WITH BESTBUY--UNLESS YOU BUY THE WARRANTY. Also, I have a platinum CITIBANK card where they DOUBLE my warranty on everything I buy with the card. THEY have paid me on a monitor I bought. I couldn't believe it. Any thoughts on this TV, especially YOU MIKE!!!!

 

Mike- I was under the impression that the new Blu Ray and HD DVD formats were encoded at 1080p, leaving aside downconverting deliberately to 'protect' content).
As to broadcast standards today, I hear you- frankly, I don't watch much TV (only the program '24') and rely largely on DVD sources, outputted in SDI through a HD Leeza backbone.
Granted, those DVDs are not 'high def' but look fabulous when processed though the Leeza and outputted directly into a DLP projector without D/A conversion.
Thank-you, though, for correcting me as to interlacing on P v i in the plasma/LCD context. But, assuming that there were true 1080p content, wouldn't that look better than deinterlaced 1080p?

 

http://www.plasmatvbuyingguide.com
http://www.lcdtvbuyingguide.com
http://www.dlptvreview.com

After reading the first two links, I was set on buying plasma due to lower cost and better black level. Then, I figured that since the new TV was still going to be on a TV stand (and not mounted on a wall), I couldn't justify the higher price of either over DLP. I ended up buying a 46" Samsung DLP that is 10" in depth and weighs 40lbs for $1300 at Circuit City.

Regarding lifespan, both plasma and lcd are rated at 60,000 hours (says the first two links). If you watch 8 hours of TV/day, then either will last you 12 years (assuming you buy a good quality brand).

Last piece of advice: comparing picture at the store is not the same when it's sitting in your living room. Don't necessarily trust your eyes at the stores.

///Michael

 

Hitachi has recently released the highest definition 42inch plasma tv. Am I going to see a real differance over a normal hdtv 42inch plasma or lcd?

http://www.hitachi.us/tv/browse/plasma/plasma/42hdx99.shtml

 

here is something to think about...

rear projection HDTV.

it has niether of the downsides of LCD (poor contrast, poor blacks, blocky rendition) or of Plasma (large costs for large sets).

I have a 65" rear projection Sony HDTV set and it looks GREAT, and cost less than sets half the size.

My 65" cost me $3k 2 years ago and has performed like a champ.

keep in mind I'm used to looking at $20-30k Barco monitors all day at work.

a very simple rule applies though, garbage in garbage out. Rotten looking SD compressed cable signals look worse when blown up to 65". Blocky, compressed HD cable shows its ills when blown up large as well.


just something to think about. Larger size, much lower price.

newer technology does not always equal better picture quality.

 

Dont be sorry - I was just trying to fill in the blanks, sorry if I came across harshly. You're absolutely right on the sharpness of the screen - I am surprised nobody tiles LCD panels so they can make modular displays. I guess it wouldnt do much good if there is no content to take advantage of it. I am a big fan of big screens, but those who are more into it than me always say you can go too big... I dunno, I'm thinking of a 60 inch in my bedroom which has the wall about 14 feet from the bed - some say way too big, but I like it!

As far as I know regular DVDs are not even high-def, 480p I think? HD-DVD and Bluray are both 1080i. On the satellite front, I am ashamed to admit that I dont even have HD satellite, so I don't know - but I do know that most of their sports programming is in 720p and most of the movies are 1080i. I think 1080i is as good as it's going to get for the next several years at least.

Thats a pretty amazing deal with Costco guaranteeing it for life - amazing really!

On the TV's, I couldn't get the link to work - when I paste it I get an error from costco, but I went to their site and found a 65" plasma Panasonic for $7999 - that one? It looks good, the only thing I didnt like is that its 1366x768, so it won't display a 1900x1080 picture without "squishing" it into the number of pixels. As to how much worse it would look on this 1366x768 TV versus a native 1900x1080? I dont know - I haven't seen too many comparisons. To the layman it probably would look very similar, but it would be when you were closer that you'd notice, and also during a side-by-side comparison. Then again, lots of people think DVD's on their 27" tube look amazing, so at some level we're perfectionists right? I dont know what the largest size display is that has a native 1900x1080 pixels, but I know I've seen up to 42", and I think I have seen a couple of 47".

 

I think they are being confusing with their terminology - bluray does run at 1080p, but at 30fps. 1080i runs at 60fps... but that's somewhat of a misnomer, because it' 60fps but each fps is 1/2 the screen, so it's really 30fps.

I believe that in the beginning, HD-DVD was proposed to be 1080i/60 and bluray was 1080p/30. Because (IMO) there is a lot of misinformation out there, some pressure to change was being put out against the HD-DVD crowd, so they changed their spec and decided to store content in 1080p format on the disc. It's digital data, and really doesn't matter how it's stored. The difference really is like you said, if it's 1080p on the disc, and the player is 1080p, and the tv is 1080p, then theoretically it should be 1080p right to the screen. Bluray is 1080p/30, and I believe most players (maybe all?) for bluray discs are 1080p, so they would output a 1080p signal. That doesn't mean there can't be 1080i players that send half the info, twice as fast

Anyway, after HD-DVD changed to a native 1080p "storage format", the hardware was already done, so other than the XBOX360, I believe ALL current HD-DVD players output 1080i.

The thing about loss vs. lossless however is, I think, largely leftover from the analog world. You know about a billion times more than I do about audio, but I do a lot of electronics design, so I probably understand your world a little bit - and in the audio world, any time you change from an analog to digital signal, you lose information. Even with a sampling rate beyond what humans can distinquish, you still lose info, and the better the sound reproduction hardware you have, the more apparent that loss is. However 1080 signals are digital to start with so re-interlacing a 1080i signal into 1080p is a lossless operation. Just like if I give you a stack of 52 cards in one hand, then I hand you two stacks of 26. You put them together and get 52 cards either way, you never end up with less. Each card is a discrete unit and they are not changed or lost during the re-assembly into a stack of 52. Lots of AV nuts presume that there could theoretically be some loss, but I don't buy it, haven't seen it, never heard of anyone who has. And there have been a lot of tests where even the die-hard guys cannot tell the difference between native 1080p/30 and 1080i/60->1080p/30. Knowing a little about how the electronics work at the hardware level, I think anyone who frets over 1080p vs de-interlaced 1080i->1080p, probably has an unfounded fear or a lack of understanding of the process. Once it gets into the TV, it's all the same - its not like 1080p signals are routed through one processor and 1080i through another, inferior, one. The internal frame buffer is just a bunch of memory chips - whether they are populated in even then odd manner or sequentially just doesn't matter in terms of the output.

I can see the theory that buying 1080p/60 capability today is good in case it ever comes down the wire, but I think many folks assume that because we went from 480i->480p->720p->1080i, and because some things like bluray/PS3/XBOX/HD-DVD say things like "1080p!" on them, that they NEED this in their TV to make it work.


PS Bill, I saw your post in the audio thread - absolutely amazing setup. I dont know what half of that is, other than it looks like a couple of jet engines you made into speakers, but it looks awesome. I always love to see someone who is really into their hobby enjoying it to the fullest. I love machinery, watches, metalworking, electronics and such, and I really enjoy looking at that record player you have. Just the notion that cost is no object, and what would the very BEST way to make something be... I get a huge kick out of seeing the results. Enjoy in good health!

 

Another thing to keep in mind is that the failure mode of these TV's is not that it just craps the bed one day, it's the half-brightless level usually. So, at 60k hours, you can expect your plasma TV to be about half as bright as it was when you got it.

The good (and bad) news, is the degradation rate is not linear! It falls of much quicker in the first few thousand hours, then stabilizes into a relatively steady rate of decay until around 60k hours it's 1/2 what it was new.

So the best thing to keep from burning out your plasma TV is to only watch it for 20 or 30 minutes a day! Just imagine it slowly roasting itself while you watch those commercials and movie credit lists

 

Tru dat, BUT, most rear projectors use 7" CRT "guns", which cannot resolve over around 700 lines of resolution. They just cannot focus the beam tightly enough to get more detail than that. Some large RPTV's use 9" CRT's which can do around 900-1000, but it's still pushing it to be able to resolve 1080 lines... and regarding the 1900 vertical lines, forget it, ain't gonna happen.

On the other hand, CRT RPTV's have no issues with blurring/pixelating when they are run at varying resolutions.

There's always a drawback. As often happens when we go digital, we find that some things about analog were superior. CD's are great, as are MP3's, but most audiophiles prefer records because there is just more data, and more resolution. With RPTV's, we can run them at any resolution, the limiting factor is bandwidth for signal processing and the size of the CRT's. I'm surprised nobody has made a RPTV with bigger CRT's, but I guess everyone's going to LCD/plasma, so nobody woudl buy them.


The next big thing is going to be OLED. Organic LED's. They are printed onto a substrate, so they can be miniscule in size compared to traditional LED's. They output light, whereas LCD tech just blocks background light to create the illusion of giving off their own light. They have instant response time, are capable of insane resolutions, draw little power - and get this - they can be printed on a plastic substrate whereas LCD goes on glass. So, you could have a TV that was theoretically about as thick as an acetate film you put on an overhead projector, and its flexible. You could build your own curved IMAX dome in your house

 

How long are we talking for this to come out!!!!!!
Erik
PS your posts are awesome to read on the subject