mart360

LCD & plasma tv,s???

from what i,ve seen of lcd, its a case of emperors new clothes!!

unless you have a 60 in one, and watch from at least 6 feet away, there nothing short of diabolical, and that goes for ALL models,

if i,m going to shell out best part of 1K+ (in the future) i want a tv that delivers the same clarity as crt, not pixelates, shimmers, or looks like a two year old has got a pot of paints and is hand painting all the screens


is plasma any better???


Mart

imlach

Err...but most people do tend to watch a large screen tv at a distance of 6ft or more...

...My 32" LCD looks perfectly fine at 5ft or 6ft away. What you are complaining about is actually the optical illusion of CRT...ie, it is the crap source that is making the LCD look crap - ie, low quality of tv transmissions. The CRT just looks "better" because it is better at "merging" together crap quality images.

I'm sure you find that viewing JPEG photos on a PC LCD monitor perfectly fine? Which proves the point - it's the source....

PS Not sure about the shimmering and "hand painting", but if the response time of the LCD is as fast as the latest generation ones (ie, 12ms or faster), then you shouldn't see "smearing". ie, footballs which seem to smudge/smear. Don't get this on my LCD at all.

paulr

Do you think a retailer would let you take in your own dvd player and try an LCD out that way.I've always that crt looks a much better picture.

scud8

iTrader: (1)

I have a few LCD TVs in the house now. The picture quality does vary a lot - the best (a 32" Panasonic TX32LXD500 and a two-year old 15" Sony) are as good as if not better than CRT, and the worst (a 27" Toshiba I wish I hadn't bought) is as bad as you describe.

It is worth looking around and getting demos before buying.

mart360

so the original dvd of the u2 concert is a crap source, (good)

and how did you come up with that nugget?? so how does smearing, overblown skin tones and artifacts come down to poor source?? bearing in mine its a commercial dvd!!

the dvd of my nipper when viewed on a crt was as intended with natural skin tones, yet on the lcd it looked as if he had headlights fixed to his cheeks..


re the lcd monitor.... erm nope never will, we had em at work, fine on static images at v high resolutions but pants on moving images


with all due respect all i hear is the emperors new clothes when it comes to lcd


is plasma any better.... i seem to recall everyone raving on about 100hz scanning on crt, and that was pants, too


Mart

imlach

Out of interest, which make & model of LCD TV was it as it sounds like a pretty crap one if it was smeaing....?

DVD is still a pretty crap source compared to what an LCD is capable of. Have you seen the HD demos anywhere? Pretty impressive.

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

After many years of shunning LCD, I'm now converted to LCD...after seeing my mates HD ready 27" LG (crap sound though).

The large Pioneer plasmas are still nothing short of superb though.

Any other brands though are iffy at best, even main brand amongst the likes of Sony and Panasonic (both LCD and PLasma) etc.

Decent 100hz CRTs are not pants either. I can no longer watch any other 50hz CRT no matter how good (or even a PC monitor running at 70hz or lower ) without getting a headache from the flicker

....makes me wonder how on earth I managed to cope with our old 50hz square googly box.

mart360

if you mean the rolling ones that run in comet, there totally crap!!!


look at the definition it claims, and pauses the live image, and you get a blurred parrot caught in freeze frame... thats really a good demo....

or the usual tricks panning round a static image, or a sea shot with enhanced colours.... if they want to sell the set up, they should have the right stuff to do it...



tv was a samsung or lg deffo not on my list



Mart

mart360

so you dont like the flicker, but will accept pixelation and artifacts

strange


M

imlach

First thing. Don't rely on Comet to show a good image! My local Comet seemed to have the HD demo setup well, but the non-HD sets were showing naff pictures (perhaps deliberate sales ploy!).

Never EVER seen top notch images on ANY set in Comet etc though.

My tv at home looks better than my old CRT. Period.

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

Dpends where that pixelation and artifacts comes from.

With Sky/cable/digital terretrial, you have no choice - You get it on CRT LCD or Plasma. Even happens on DVD if you have a sharp eye.


However, I have seen some diabolically cheap and nasty LCDs and Plasmas, worst probably being a 2nd hand Hitachi my dad bought a while back. Where its like it cannot display 32bit colour and has to dither the colours to get the right shading - especially on blues and skin tones.

So, not strange at all: You get what you pays.

Our CRT in the lounge was not cheap at the time, but I have a cheap and nasty 100hz in the bedroom, and is miles apart in picture quality.

As is cheap Hitachi plasma compared Pioneer's top end Plasma.

And as is Sony's older low end LCD's compared to the latest top end LG.


Now, going round saying they are all rubbish from the £100 Bekos to the £10,000 Pioneers does come across as a little strange

GC8

Mart you keep posting the same ****e about about LCD televisions..... Im afraid that the DVD youve referred to is "a crap source". My 40" Sony LCD (recently given five out of five stars by 'What HiFi' in a rave review) shows the shortcomings on virtually every DVD that I own. The artifacts that you mention are caused by the MPEG2 compression and theyre shown by the superior screen, not caused by it ffs!


Simon

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

I've been there with crap DVD's LOL

I thought it was something wrong with one of the settings on the TV multitude of picture adaption controls.

After god know how much fiddling (blaming the tv, the leads the player etc. ). Tried it on a mates TV, low and behold, exact same problem

Recent bad DVD I watched was "Alfie". Take note of the freeze frame on Marissa Tomei or the skyline in the first scene or of the limo driving at night - you can't help but notice the pixelation.

J4CKO

iTrader: (1)

I bought a HD Samsung, have to say its as good as the big Sony CRT I have, its also only 3 inches thick, you can plug a pc into it, it doenst go 'Thump' when you turn it on or drain the grid. Much less environmental impact as well, mine weighs about a quarter of what the CRT one does.

Some are indeed rubbish, especially the early ones but nowadays they have really come on, the picture on ours is stunning, really lifelike, thats why I bought it, plus the fact that there is no such thing AFAIK as a HD CRT so come the new broadcasts you will miss out on the additional quality. Also a CRT is old technology that has had much refinement despite it being a fairly sub optimal solution over the years (since what, 1920's ?), ffs its a big electron gun that shoots at a screen and makes it light up, they are trick to set up, the geometary is critical and easy to knock out, it all centers around bending the electron beam with huge magnets. So my question is, considering the LCD screen has only been around a few years for general commercial/domestic use, what will we be buying in 10 or 20 years ?

CRT's top out at 37 inches, plenty big enough for most but there is a reason why there are 60 inch LCD's and plasma's, cos they can, CRT tubes get impossibly heavy, they have to get thicker to support their own weight which makes them impractical, LCD's can be made bigger (at a lower yield, hence the expense) and only get heavier at a proportional rate rather than exponentional like CRT's. They were only still used because there was nothing better, better has now arrived.

We have been waiting for years for the flat television, now the technology has finally arrived and matured a bit I cant understand why people are still clinging to the old stuff, sure use it till it wears out (waste not and all that) but buy an LCD when you need a new one, I suspect that the CRT supplies will start drying up soon, many CRT plants are shutting down so you wont get one anyway, Video Recorders went the same way, so are film cameras (for most uses). I mean why the hell would Comet want to stock the honking great things when they can fit 4 LCD's in the same space in the warehouse ?

imlach

Also, remember that if you didn't have compression on a movie, for a 2 hour movie, you'd need the DVD to be able to hold 100Gb+ of data.

Now, a DVD is 9Gb max, so that's a compression of 10x using MPEG2.
Hence the pixellation etc.

DVD-HD and BlueRay will improve things, but they're still compressed.

imlach

You can get HD CRT's in other markets where HD has been around for a while longer (and LCD wasn't mature).