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What's the Best General Purpose Display?
Who Man asks: "There are many options when buying a display today: Direct-View CRT, CRT-Based Rear Projection, CRT-Based Front Projection, Direct-View LCD, LCD-Based Rear Projection, LCD-based Front Projection, DLP-based Rear Projection, DLP-based Front Projection, Plasma, lcos-based front projection, and lcos-based rear projection. Did I leave anything out? Each of these seems to have a distinct trade-off, and it gets especially confusing when the display is intended for multiple purposes--watching analog 4:3 video, watching hi-def 16:9 video, watching DVDs (in several different aspect ratios), playing PC games, and playing console games. A particularly sticky area seems to be getting a display that handles analog and digital signals equally well. Seems that the newer digital displays are great at displaying hi-def signals but make an analog TV show look horrible. Is there a display that's adept at handling multiple inputs? Has anyone had specific experience, good or bad, with any particular displays? What about using an external processor with a digital display?"
I'd have to say that a digital projector in any case is going to beat out a direct view CRT or rear projection CRT (unless you're talking about a 19" computer monitor). Only the most expensive 8" and 9" front projection CRT's can equal or outperform a nice digital projector. DLP projectors are the best bet in my opinion. They have perfectly square pixels with very little space between them (i.e. no screen door effect). DLP's do have their downsides, like reduced color saturation at low luminosity, the RGB flickering effect visible when moving your eyes around quickly (this is reduced significantly by projectors with 6-segment color wheels and/or higher color wheel rotation speed), and the "DLP crawlie effect" caused by the dithering done to convert the high bandwidth signal to the (binary?) range of the DMD; this effect is most visible when displaying a dim image with lots of similar colors next to each other, and standing right next to the screen and moving your head toward and away from the screen. Still, for the increased lifetime over LCD projectors, I'd always recommend DLP front projection for almost any application. I bought my projector 3-years used, and it still has perfect image quality. Bulbs are about 20-50 cents per hour of usage, so if you always have friends over to watch movies/TV, you can have them pay you a quarter each and recover your bulb costs.
In short, an XGA or WXGA DLP projector will probably suit your needs. For digital viewing, an HDTV tuner that can scale to 1024x768p (or 1365x768p) will be fine (I recommend the MyHD PCI card), and for analog viewing, Dscaler does a great job. For Linux, there's tvtime, but tvtime seems to delay the video more than Dscaler, so you might need to add a delay to the audio to compensate. For DVD, Ogle or Xine is best for NTSC titles.
A solution to the problem with music today
High-resolution direct-view CRTs are still the quality benchmark that other displays strive for but still fall short of. It has a superior combination of contrast, dynamic range, and resolution compared to any alternative.
Other displays may be larger (direct-view CRTs drop off at a size considered modest for home theater), but none beat the quality.
First of all, go to www.avsforum.com and you can find information about all these different technologies. There's tradeoffs, and there doesn't seem to be a perfect set yet. Especially not in the price range of mere mortals. Having said this, my Samsung 50" DLP rear-projection set came in on Friday, and it's amazing for component DVD. Only okay for standard definition cable, and Time Warner is having some trouble getting a HD signal to me, but that is supposed to be very very nice as well. Where this set is really supposed to shine is PC viewing, either through the VGA or DVI connectors. I haven't tried either, as I've been too busy re-watching my entire DVD collection :)
The drawbacks on these sets tends to be in black levels, and a "rainbow" effect when you move your head that some people can see, and I cannot. There's also a $250 bulb that will occasionally need to be replaced (mtbf 8000 hours).
The Sony Grand Wega LCD set is supposed to look better for SD cable, and really good for DVDs, but LCDs are prone to pixels getting "stuck", and you have to worry about image burn-in. Plus, getting a PC to display on the Grand Wega takes some fiddling; on the Samsung DLP, you more or less just plug it in.
The Dell 2000FP 20" LCD has four inputs: D-sub (analog, VGA), DVI, composite and S-video. Nice display.
Right now I'm really anxious for my monitor to wear out because LCDs have fallen into my price range. But have they worked out the latency kinks yet? Well, I don't care, 'cause I'm not a gamer. YMMV!