Is the Flat-Screen Telly a bit of a con?

I watch TV on a Philips Pixel-Plus I CRT television bought in 2004 for about
£1000....at the same time it was married to a Panansonic TU-CT20 Freeview
box and the pictures have always been absolutely superb for colour ,
contrast and above all detail.....I have yet to see in any store and I have
looked a lot or in the homes of my friends with a Freeview or Sky
signal,anything be it plasma or LCD that gets anywhere near.

The demise of the top-of-the-range CRT sets (I don't by the way mean
Trinitrons) has been a bigger loss than many people realise....with
digitised picture handling they were at the zenith of their development and
they have been abandoned, at least in Europe, prematurely.

We are are hearing so much crap in Britain about HD as if it was we who had
had to put up with the appalling NTSC standard not just the Yanks..sure HDTV
is fantastic for them but the gain against PAL is much ,much less besides
which it is the programme content that matters above all..garbage is garbage
whether it is analogue garbage or HD garbage.And now it seems many of the
"HD" LCDs and Plasmas won't be up to the job anyway come the day (whenever)
that HD arrives.

http://money.guardian.co.uk/consumer...014901,00.html

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I've mixed views.

The big gain with LCD/plasma is that they save stacks of space & give
you the opportunity for large screen sizes.

Picture quality on LCDs has generally looked poor to me, both on the
two I have and on those I see in the shops. Generally worse than on
CRT. But, much better geometry.

My view is that good plasmas are much better than LCDs. Certainly my
Panasonic 4 series blew away the picture on my old Panasonic CRT in
just about every way.

HD still doesn't feel worth it here. The demos I've seen have, to me,
only shown minor improvements over standard def. And, anyway, with
FreeView, there'd be far more picture improvement if they simply
increased the bitrates of standard def material. And, while there's
such scarcity of source material, I certainly think it's daft to buy a
new HD TV now - would be far better to wait until the source material
is available.

But for me, the space saving still wins out. And I think this,
coupled with the cool factor is enough to sell to many. The sad thing
is all those folk who probably believe they're watching HDTV when
they're not!

In article .com, Alec
writes
I've mixed views.

The big gain with LCD/plasma is that they save stacks of space & give
you the opportunity for large screen sizes.

Picture quality on LCDs has generally looked poor to me, both on the
two I have and on those I see in the shops. Generally worse than on
CRT. But, much better geometry.

My view is that good plasmas are much better than LCDs. Certainly my
Panasonic 4 series blew away the picture on my old Panasonic CRT in
just about every way.

What source was that ?....

--
Tony Sayer

On 2007-02-21, Alec wrote:

HD still doesn't feel worth it here.

I think it's ace, chiefly because it means I can get relatively cheap,
enormous monitors for my computer ;-)

I've tried HD 1080p demos on it, and they certainly are appreciably
sharper, I can easily see the difference between the same HD demo
(Pirates of Carribean 2) played at HD res and scaled down to 1360x576,
but it's not as big a difference as was made when moving from a Loewe
Cantus 28" CRT to a 46" Sony Bravia. The larger screen and higher res
meant that I could see much more detail, probably because it's now so
big that I don't take the whole image in with one look and my eyes
dart around and spot things I didn't spot before. DVDs at the same
res as on my Cantus show (or appear to at any rate) much more detail
on the big screen even though they're the same res. This is all from
the same DVD player.

So I'm not convinced that HD is worth it for most people, but keep
quiet about it, I want the big, cheap, high-res computer monitors ;-)

--
Blast off and strike the evil Bydo empire!

But for me, the space saving still wins out. And I think this,
coupled with the cool factor is enough to sell to many. The sad thing
is all those folk who probably believe they're watching HDTV when
they're not!

The HD Ready logo is still misleading, and The Gadget Show reinoforced it.
They give the impression that if you get a HD Ready set with a Freeview
tuner then your made. I got a Hd Ready set and saved £150 compared to the
Freeview version becuase I knew the only way to get HD today was by an
external box. since I already had SKY+ I upgraded to SKY HD.

They should make it clear that a Freeview MPEG2 DVB-T tuner will not support
the MPEG4 HD broadcasts expected in the (distant) future.A HD Ready set is
far from ready for HD!

On 2007-02-21, Ian Rawlings wrote:

(Pirates of Carribean 2) played at HD res and scaled down to 1360x576,

Oops, sorry, wrong res, I'd really see the difference at that res,
they'd all be fat!

I mean whatever it is x 576, so better than 720x576 scaled anamorphically.

--
Blast off and strike the evil Bydo empire!

So I'm not convinced that HD is worth it for most people, but keep
quiet about it, I want the big, cheap, high-res computer monitors ;-)

--
Blast off and strike the evil Bydo empire!

Most people will not be using a HD source with their HD set. The quality of
SD on HD sets is variable to say the least, and I doubt any shop shows SD
on their wonderful HD sets, even though 95% of those buying will never use
them with HD sources.

"Horovan" wrote in message
...


I watch TV on a Philips Pixel-Plus I CRT television bought in 2004 for
about £1000....at the same time it was married to a Panansonic TU-CT20
Freeview box and the pictures have always been absolutely superb for
colour , contrast and above all detail.....I have yet to see in any store
and I have looked a lot or in the homes of my friends with a Freeview or
Sky signal,anything be it plasma or LCD that gets anywhere near.

The demise of the top-of-the-range CRT sets (I don't by the way mean
Trinitrons) has been a bigger loss than many people realise....with
digitised picture handling they were at the zenith of their development
and they have been abandoned, at least in Europe, prematurely.

We are are hearing so much crap in Britain about HD as if it was we who
had had to put up with the appalling NTSC standard not just the
Yanks..sure HDTV is fantastic for them but the gain against PAL is much
,much less besides which it is the programme content that matters above
all..garbage is garbage whether it is analogue garbage or HD garbage.And
now it seems many of the "HD" LCDs and Plasmas won't be up to the job
anyway come the day (whenever) that HD arrives.

On saturday when I was out shopping for a TV I spotted the fairly new
Samsung Slimfit crt TV. I first saw about these last year I think it was
when they were announced - HDTV but CRT technology but slightly slimmer than
a standard crt. It was still bulky though and very very heavy.
I know shop displays cannot usually be relied on, but this TV had a much
better picture than the other HDTVs on the store. It also had all the right
connections and was only £399.
I very nearly bought it. It was a choice between that and the 399 Polaroid.
In the end I decided on the Polaroid HDTV really because of the space
saving. The whole point of getting a new TV was to save some space in my
small bedroom. Had the "slimfit" tv been a little bit slimmer and not so
heavy, I probably would have gone with that as the picture was amazing.

On 2007-02-21, John Russell wrote:

Most people will not be using a HD source with their HD set. The quality of
SD on HD sets is variable to say the least, and I doubt any shop shows SD
on their wonderful HD sets, even though 95% of those buying will never use
them with HD sources.

Most shops show their TVs at max contrast with sharpness set high and
all the daft picture "enhancement" garbage turned on, so just about
anything looks pants. I'm amazed people can go into a shop and look
at the in-shop TVs and still buy something.

--
Blast off and strike the evil Bydo empire!

In article , Ian Rawlings
wrote:
Most shops show their TVs at max contrast with sharpness set high and
all the daft picture "enhancement" garbage turned on, so just about
anything looks pants. I'm amazed people can go into a shop and look
at the in-shop TVs and still buy something.

Most people aren't looking at the picture, they are looking at the
cabinet/frame to see if it will go well with the sofa and the
sideboard. When they get it home they leave it on the default
over-bright over-blue setting with 4x3 inputs stretched to 16x9.

You want to stand around in John Lewis's on a Saturday afternoon, it's
an education.