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Forty-two Inch Plasma Monitor
An anonymous reader writes "PCstats has a review of what should have been under my Christmas tree - a 42" plasma display from Samsung Since Santa couldn't have possibly brought this monster down the chimney, we'll just have to be satisfied with the review. They even hooked it up to a computer and played games on it...."
But what is the question?
... for anything I couldn't drive, sleep in, or have sex with.
A 42" screen that I can watch TV on at 640x480. That's only nineteen DPI.
Or, I could play doom on it at less than ten dots per inch!
I wonder what a Doom3 framerate would be at an acceptable resolution for this!? Would you need to pay more for the computer to use this than for the monitor? Does Windows have a "special edition"(seperate $300 license) for this type of display?
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
You seem to overestimate the cost and underestimate the brightness of front projection.
You also completely omitted DLP - Display Light Processing by Texas Instruments, which now gets contrast ratios that rival CRTs. They are available in front and rear projections.
As for resolution, a 42" plasma is about 865x480 (WVGA), and cost between $4000 to $6000, whereas a projector of comparable resolution can be had for $1500. A 50" plasma runs about $10000-$13000 and those resolve about 1280x720, which is WXGA. One can get several WXGA video projectors costing from $3000 to over $10000.
You don't seem to think that the available projection brightness rating is a lot but it is pretty good and has been improving for quite some time. I think 1000 lumens it would be about as much brightness as said 42" plasma sets put out, and you can adjust the projected image size. The difference is that because projectors rely on reflected rather than emitted light to show an image on a screen, emitted light makes a difference in how the screen looks. Reflected light systems wash out a little easier because the base screen is white rather than black.
[Left Brain]
Great! Now we can watch 10 dozen channels of crap at 3 and an half feet tall.
[Right Brain]
Yeah but there are TWO Matrix's coming out! And then Return of the King!!
[Left]
It's a gazillion dollars!
[Brain]
AND Daredevil AND the Hulk.
[Left]
Yeah but the resolution could be better and we hatesses the MPAA!
[Right]
Look how SMALL Spider-Man is! LEAVE US ALONE!
It's going right in the middle of that wall.
Operator, give me the number for 911!
For a (reletively) mere $2,000, you can get a good, bright projector capable HDTV-like quality at 1280x1024 That gives you a good 3'-25' screen for what, 1/10 the price of that plasma monster?
Repeal the DMCA!
is limited to 800x600. it's hardly good for any serious computer use. this article's title is very misleading.
The composite video inputs offered the best overall picture which is to be expected, followed by the RCA video connection and S-Video in a distant last place.
This statement worries me, here's why (excerpt from a cnet article):
Composite video
Although the composite-video system was developed for color-TV signals, it doesn't give you a very sharp picture. Composite video was created as a backward-compatible solution for television's transition from black and white to color. It was a fairly clever solution to the problem of how to continue to send the same black-and-white picture to all the old sets and layer color information on top--a composite of those two picture components. The black-and-white sets ignored the color component, while the newer sets separated out the color information and displayed it with the black-and-white picture. This made for a smooth TV transition in the 1950s with low-resolution color TVs. Today, though, sophisticated high-resolution displays show all of the compression artifacts and cross-color (or moiré) blurring that comes with a composite video connection. It's simply impossible to perfectly separate the color and picture information of a composite-video signal. So, if your TV picture isn't sharp enough or the colors blur together, the likely culprit is a composite output signal.
S-Video
S-Video, which was introduced in the 1980s, solved some of the problems that came with composite video. It provides better color separation and a much cleaner signal. S-Video does so by keeping separate the color and picture parts of a composite-video signal. You'll find S-Video ports on most TVs for sale today, but not many people are really taking advantage of them yet. Why is that? Well, take a look at Direct Broadcast Satellite, for example. It starts broadcasting in the composite-video domain, and even though it is a component-video format, the artifacts associated with composite video still show up in the picture.
Component video
Component video improves the picture quality even more by not only separating the color from the black-and-white portions of the picture but by further splitting the color information into two color-difference signals. When the picture signal is split up in this way, you get an unfiltered, uninterrupted image, with better resolution and greatly improved color saturation. And this is why component video is the predominant method of hookup from HDTV set-top decoders to HDTVs.
Before I launch into a wildly enthusiastic discussion of DLP, I just want to point out one amusing problem with Plasma TVs. They wont work over 6200 feet of elevation, which is where much of the soutwest US lives. I live at 7000 feet. bummer.
I have a Plus 800x600 DLP projector I use as my movie projector. I got it as a refurb unit for $1000. I normally project a 10 foot wide screen.
I've tried a couple of these things out so let me give you some tips.
First, if you are buying one to watch DVD movies then first DO NOT BUY an XGA or and SXGA model, instead buy the cheaper 800x600 model. Why? because it will look much better. the reason is simple, 800x600 is nearly perfectly matched to the resolution of a dvd. if you get a higher resolution projector, the machine will be forced to interpolate pixels, and this not only looks icky, by when things move in the picture the edges tear with the interlaced interpolation (some expensive interpolators do a slightly better job but they all suck compared to not interpolating). The nice part is it costs lesss for lower resoultion
second, the second most important spec is the contrast ration. get anything below 500:1 and you are wasting your money. You wont really notice the differenence until you see it side by side with a better projector. But what happens is you cant see any texture in dark clothing, hair or bright skies. I have an 800+ and I like it very much. Note because the manufacturer's lie about this spec consider all machines within 20% of the same number to be the same contrast.
third, the next most important spec is noise. Unless you have a way of locking this thing away from you, it's really distracting. get a quite one. For reason's I'm not too certain about it appears the DLP projectors run quieter than the LCD ones. I suspect this is because the DLP chip does not absorb light and thus runs cooler inherently.
fourth, While color saturation of LCDs is marginally better than DLPs, the contrast ratio way out ranks this. One thing you can do to get the best possible color saturation on a DLP is to look for one with a pure three-color wheel rather than a 3-color-plus-white wheel. Sometimes to squeeze more lumens out of these the manufacturers add a white-phase to the primary colors. this reduces the color saturation.
fifth, nearly ALL (not quite all) DLP projectors are made by a single company then re-branded in different cases with different feature sets or color wheels. PLUS is the name of this manufacturer. So dont be too picky about which manufacturer you buy from.
Lumens. THe more the merrier as long as you aren't sacrificing any of the above considerations. I'd say 800 was the minimum number and 1600 is very nice. you can of course make the screen smaller, and only project at nighttime or in a darkened room. Some people use special screens. these can almost double the effective brightness over a white wall. But white walls are actually nicer to work with than screens. screens tend to curl at the edges, cant adjust well to different aspect ratios and can ripple in the breeze (which produces a nice mind bending effect by the way), plus if they aren't fixed mounted they are a hassle.
Source: computers with RGB out put are MASSIVELY better than a DVD player. Dont even think about s-video output. (really, sont even think about it). THe downside with computer projectors is 1) the dvd software/hardware is much less forgiving of scratched dvds and 2) sometimes its hard to get good 5.1 dolby sound out put.
The main downside to DLP projectors over a TV is the lifetime ot the bulb. typcial bulb lifetimes are 1000 or 2000 hours, though you can figure maybe only half of that time will be at full power illumination. bulbs cost 250 - 500 depending on the model. that's plenty of time if all you watch is dvd's but if you want to waste hours and hours on TV shows then that's not a lot. On the other hand the DLP was a lot less cost than the plasma screen, so maybe you should not worry so much.
the good news is that probably by the time your first bulb burns out philips will probably have come out with 10,000 hour bulbs for your model (a few are out now).
So for my money, skip the plasma screen and go with a white wall and a DLP.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
It's only interlaced in the horizontal. There's a whole of misinformation on this thread so here's the factual rundown.
NTSC offers 525 scanlines per frame and it is horizontally interlaced into two fields. There are 20 overscan lines per field so there are only 485 visible lines per frame. The horizontal resolution for NTSC is 720. Digital formats store 720x480 pixels per frame and the player produces interlaced fields for your TV.
However it is still a resolution of 720x480, despite being interlaced. Your comment that it is "only half" that resolution is not correct. The interlacing affects the framerate, not the resolution.
What resolution your TV actually displays is an entirely different matter. I have read that some (cheaper) TVs only show ~320 distinct scanlines. It's a similar problem to dot pitch on monitors.