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CRTs Still Beat Flat-Panel TVs
mr.henry writes "Consumers scrambling for sexy new flat-panel televisions may want to tune in to this less-publicized feature of the trendy boxes: They don't deliver pictures as clearly as traditional tube TVs do. Consumers think they're buying the best in technology (with flat-panel televisions), but it's more of an emotional purchase."
There is an interesting set of articles over at Extremetech that compare CRT, LCD, Plasma and DLP display systems.
1. It seems nobody cared that the user interface becomes blurry and unreadable if you set screen resolution to anything other than integer fractions of the maximum resolutions supported by the flat screens. Unless you want to pay premium for killer video cards to go along with the flat screens, or watching a giant black border on the screen, your 3d gaming performance will go down because of this flat panel 'feature'. You definitely DON'T want ugly scaling on real time streategy games.
2. As someone have mentioned before, you can pay twice as much money for the LCD screens of high resolution. The strange part is, the cut-off resolution for which flat screen becomes a luxury. Searching in price engine shows following:
cheapest 1024x768 LCD: $~300 (KDS Radius RAD 5gs)
cheapest 1280x1024 LCD: $~400 (Samsung 713V)
cheapest 1600x1200 LCD: $~1000(!) (Viewsonic VP201b)
cheapest 1920x1200 LCD: $~2750 (Samsung 243T)
cheapest 1920x1440 CRT: $~300 (Samsung DynaFlat 997DF)
Is the technology of eliminating dead pixel on LCD _that_ expensive? It looks like it, until I discovers when upgrading LCD screens on notebook, the price differential is much smaller when jumping between resolutions:
Stock Dell Inspiron 9200 w/ 17 inch Ultra Sharp WXGA+ screen (1440x900): $2079
Stock Dell Inspiron 9200 w/ 17 inch Ultra Sharp WUXGA screen (1920x1200): $2279
The resolution difference is even bigger than Viewsonic VP201b vs Samsung 243T, and yet it costs only $200 more instead of $1750. Why the hell companies keep on overcharging on higher resolution screens?! If they want people to buy new technology, they should just make stand alone monitors with extra resolutions on smaller screens, instead of forcing consumers to buy 20/23/30-inch monitors just to get the same damn resolutions!
3. Marketing practices aside, the competing flat panel technologies (LCD, [Organic|Polymer]LED, plasma, DLP) means that manufacturers can't concentrate on bringing down the cost of flat panels in general to the point of replacing existing CRT user base, especially for high-res models.
They're getting better and cheaper all the time. Over Christmas, two members of my immediate family bought themselves projectors instead of a new TV. One was looking at spending $3000 on a 62" rear projection TV, but instead picked up one of those BenQ SVGA projectors for under $1000 CDN. The screen is easily twice the size, and they're just blown away by the clarity and how their Xbox looks on it with component cables.
Of course this solution doesn't fit all comers, as you have to put the projector somewhere that doesn't always see direct sunlight, and you need something to provide the signal (cable box, DVD player, game system, VCR with tuner, etc) and the audio (most use a stereo or 5.1 home theatre system), but in the end a lot of people I know who have gone the projector route are far happier with it than if they just got the TV. And in the majority of cases it's cheaper too. Even factoring in replacement bulbs. As my brother-in-law summed it up: "After everything is said and done, this is costing me $0.15 an hour to have a movie theater experience in my TV room!"
To read about the sort of things that are important to getting a good quality picture out of HDTV, I would recommend picking up any random issue of Widescreen Review magazine that features some CRT TV reviews to see what parameters they test on. The main thing that cheap sets (and any Plasma unit for that matter) really screw up are color linearity/accuracy and black level.
I'm going to address CRTs as far as good brands go, because if you're not getting a CRT you're prioritizing something other than image quality under normal viewing conditions. As such the non-CRT recommendation process becomes very specific to your priorities and it's hard to give a good answer. I'm not trying to be snotty here, because I certainly understand that it's often the case that display quality is not even close to the main decision parameter. For example, the last TV box I bought was a small projector, which I knew perfectly well wasn't as good as a CRT. But I was living on a 5th floor walk-up apartment and not about to haul a good TV up there when I had a short-term lease.
Anyway, Mitsubishi's high-end Diamond CRTs have the best factory calibration regime I'm aware of to make sure they are faithfully displaying their inputs, and their less expensive models are invariably at the top of the accuracy (and build quality) heap as well. Usually on the expensive side in get what you pay for fashion. At lower price ranges, Toshiba CRT sets usually give the best accuracy relative to their price. Some of the Sony sets look very good, but talk to any statistically significant number of people who have dealth with Sony repair centers and you'll never consider one of their products again.
As always with TVs, displays in showrooms are totally bogus unless you are verifying color temperature and brightness/contrast/sharpness yourself across sets. Most showrooms sets are too bright and too blue, because those are the characteristics that make people prefer a TV at first glance in the same way that louder stereo equipment always seems better at first.