Slashdot Mirror
Large Format TV Options?
pipingguy asks: "I'm planning to purchase a large screen TV and I'm leaning toward DLP at this time. After doing research on-line, I'm more confused than before. One thing I don't like about DLP is the relatively limited vertical angle for best picture viewing. LCDs don't seem to be as bad in this regard, but my understanding is that LCD is more expensive per inch. What is the current state-of-the-art for DLP? I'd rather buy a smaller TV with a better picture than one with a larger picture that is less appealing to the eye. And what about the thousands of tiny mirrors in DLP units? If these are mechanically moving parts, isn't that a likely source of failure (so says a Sony rep who wanted to sell me a LCD projection TV). Thanks for any advice/experience you can provide."
I considered plasma but having kids and a wife who doesn't care about potential burn in, went with a 42" LCD unit from Toshiba. It's surprisingly good at all angles. The only downside is the smearing of fast moving objects, but it's not really noticable unless you are looking for it.
For me, the limitted viewing angle on the DLP was the deal killer. With a large screen the, edges are out of the sweet spot. Plasma had worrisome burn in. The current generation LCDs was a pleasant surprise. Personally I would have gone with CRT but it seems in Japan, you can no longer get tubes bigger then 28".
You should consider conventional tube TVs. Consumer Reports found that the Sony KV-34HS420 ($1200) had HDTV picture quality that could only be matched by $3000+ Plasmas, and $5000+ LCDs/DLPs. This is a very recent development; last year the only wide screen HDTV conventionals were mediocre.
The downside is that they're smaller (34-inches), very heavy (200+ pounds), and voluminous.
None of the alternatives can beat conventionals in that metric.
Daniel
Judging purely from anecdotal evidence (ie, just my eyes).... if you are sensitive to screen refresh rates on a CRT, avoid DLPs like the plague.
:-)
I've always been sensitive to monitor refresh rates.... I see flicker all the time. A regular 60hz refresh bothers me a lot. Gives me a headache. 75hz is the absolute minimum acceptable refresh on a CRT, and 85hz is fine, even under fluorescents. At home, I liked to shoot for 120Hz, because that matched well with nearly everything... it gave me the smoothest possible motion. I imagine that might not work under fluorescents, but I never had a work CRT that could go that fast. (I'm all LCD these days.) (Strangely, I have never been sensitive to the 30hz video refresh rate, and I have no idea why.)
DLP makes me want to claw out my eyes and run shrieking from the room. I can point out exactly which sets are DLP from a hundred feet away. If you are at all sensitive to CRT refresh, you MUST go see DLPs in person, and you absolutely must make sure you have an ironclad return policy. The saturation and color on DLPs is a little better than LCDs, and they tend to be cheaper, but a display that gives you motion sickness is no good, no matter how cheap it is.
If, for some reason, you can't demo a set, then LCD is the safe choice... it will always work, and all your guests will be able to use it comfortably. Plasma is also a good choice, as long as you realize that it does wear out eventually. And, of course, there's always CRT-based units. They don't get as large as the other technologies, but they have amazing image quality and are very cheap, because they're the redheaded stepchild.... people think CRT is automatically inferior, just because it's old tech.
The major downside, at least to the Sony CRTs, is that they are incredibly heavy. You'll need help installing even a small screen. But the colors are rich and vibrant, the blacks are dead black, and the resolution is far better than the CRTs of old.
DLP makes me want to claw out my eyes and run shrieking from the room. I can point out exactly which sets are DLP from a hundred feet away. If you are at all sensitive to CRT refresh, you MUST go see DLPs in person, and you absolutely must make sure you have an ironclad return policy. The saturation and color on DLPs is a little better than LCDs, and they tend to be cheaper, but a display that gives you motion sickness is no good, no matter how cheap it is.
Here's the big problem with DLP sets up till now: because they use a single-source light bulb shining on a spinnig color wheel to get the color, you have an issue where very fast motion can "outrun" the spin rate of the color wheel and you get the annoying rainbow effect blurring in very fast motion video. They're reduced that problem dramatically by going to 14,400 rpm speed spinning color wheels, but you can still see it occasionally.
A number of companies--including Samsung--finally eliminated the problem this year by ditching the single-source light bulb and color wheel altogether and going with three-color LED light sources, which allow for extremely fast on-off switching of light source far faster than what could be done even with a 14,400 rpm color wheel. If you're seen the new Samsung HL-S5679W, the picture quality is outstanding even in fast motion, with virtually no rainbow effect blurring. (big thumbs up)
I decided to get a large screen TV this past Christmas. Here is how I went about it.
First, I learned about the technologies. That part was easy, and obviously you don't need me to repeat all the material that's out there. I boiled it down to either LCD rear projection, DLP, or plasma. I wasn't interested in CRT rear projection due to the price, weight, and need for professional alignment / calibration, LCD because of the size limitations, or CRT because of the size limitations and weight / size.
Second, I went to stores and evaluated different TVs which use different technologies. You can read AVSforum and all of the various professional magazines about this stuff, and they will measure black levels and white levels and everything else, but really those evaluations are nearly uselless. Those sorts of technical reviews myopically focus on individual aspects of the picture and their ratings rarely consider the overall image quality. The quality of a TV picture is really subjective, so it should be evaluated that way in terms of your buying decision. It's not always easy to do this in stores, but I decided that if I was going to buy a $1500 - $3000 tv set, the retailer was either going to help me do that, or not get my business. So I brought DVDs with me of a couple of movies that I am well familiar with and which had characteristics that would help me decide. These included:
Spider Man -- Action movie with very vivid colors and tons of sweeping action, to verify color and motion reproduction.
Sin City -- Probably the most black ever in any movie, good for, obviously, measuring black levels.
The Fellowship of the Rings -- an excellent, very sharp DVD transfer, just for image quality and again because I've seen it so many times.
(Yes, I realize that DVDs will display at 480p on these sets, and HD is 720p or 1080i, but the majority of programming I'll watch on this TV will be DVDs, and DVDs are the only media I can really control. Besides, the store always has Discovery-HD or that awful Charlotte Church video fed across all their HD sets, so it's easy to compare among the HD feeds.)
Then I went to the stores. I looked at rear-projection LCD and DLP first, since they had some compelling advangages -- similarly priced and lightweight. As it turns out, neither of these was that great. Both of those suffer from poor black levels (black looks gray) and restricted viewing angles (if you're not pretty close to perpendicular to the screen it will look dim). In addition, DLP sets have a sort of shimmering optical effect that I noticed and just didn't like. The best of the rear-projection sets was the Sony KDFE42A10 LCD RP -- it definitely had the blackest blacks and the best color reproduction -- but even so, I wasn't completetely satisfied watching movies like Sin City on it, and I still hated the picture degradation when sitting more than 45 degrees off center from it. Still, it was just about good enough. But I needed to look at plasmas.
So I went and looked at plasmas, and it was just absolutely night and day. I had spent a good deal of time looking at the rear projection sets, and each usually was better than the others in one aspect. But the plasma sets were almost all universally better than the RP sets. Colors were more vivid, blacks were blacker, the picture was smoother despite the physically lower resolution [1], and there were absolutely no shimmering effects. They weren't all free of artifacts, to be sure: some of them seemed to have slower response times, and got jaggies or pixelation in fast-moving scenes in Spider Man or when the Discovery-HD feed showed waterfalls for example. The best of the pack overall turned out to be the Panasonic TH-42PX50U. It was about $8000 higher than the Sony RP-LCD, but its picture quality just couldn't be denied, and that's what I wound up purchasing.
And about plasma... I read all about burn-in and screen lifetime, and decided neither was a big issue. I was careful to keep
I'd also suggest looking at a DLP projector.
I purchased an Optoma 739 for $1000 a year ago April and I consider it the best electronics purchase I have ever made. It has been on 24 hours a day since as I work from home and I use it as my computer monitor and television (using a HDTV cable box as the tuner).
This model is bright enough to use in a room with two lit floorlamps, is extremely quiet, bulb life is very long (it hasn't burnt out yet!), and the bulbs are relatively cheap.
People come over to watch movies or play games and drool and I paid far less than any comparable plasma or flat screen TV.
There are three major concerns regarding a projector. One is the "rainbow effect" from single chip DLP models, next is the cost of high resolution models, and third is bulb cost.
Regarding the rainbow effect, this is caused by a cost saving method the manufacturers employ. A DLP projector works by shining light onto many little mirrors that represent pixels. These mirrors are on a semiconductor chip and don't have moving motors or mechanisms. To get full colour you need red, green, and blue lights combined at various strengths. To acheieve this you can either employ three sets of mirrors each with their own coloured light (like the old projection TVs with the three big bulbs) or a cheaper way is to use one chip and rapidly alternate the light colour with a colourwheel. The old single chip DLP models had a three or 4 segment colour wheel that spun rather slowly and if you have sensitive eyes you can actually see the flicker (or it can subconsciously effect you). Personally, I notice when monitors are set to below 75Hz and it drives me crazy, but since this projector has an 8 segment colour wheel I cannot notice the rainbow. Even if trying by moving my head back and forth rapidly I can barely see the colour separation. LCD projectors do not have this problem, but from what I've seen and read, by increasing the speed and number of wheel segments DLP projectors have essentially eliminated this.
The second drawback is resolution. Native XGA (1024x768) resolution projectors are relatively inexpensive now and are usually compatible with HDTV singnals. For a TV this is more than adequate. For a computer this can be a problem. Getting a projector with higher resolution becomes much more expensive. The projectors have the ability to fake higher resolution by "smushing" some pixels together, which I have found tolerable at 1280x1024 but the image is definately not as sharp. Maybe prices on higher res models have come down in a year, but I take the tradeoff of "low" resolution for the image size and small footprint.
Finally if you do decide to buy a projector consider bulb life and cost. I'm not joking that my proejctor has been on for a year straight and am still on the same bulb. This bulb is rated at 5000 hours in "eco" mode. Also, if it DOES need to be replaced this bulb costs around $200. I previously owned an EIKI projector which went through bulbs every 3 months, were extremely hard to find, and ran $500 each. I had a hard time convincing myself to buy another projector, but I'm glad I made the decision.
I don't mention brightness being a major consideration because most projectors now are somewhere near or over 2000 lumens which is fine for a lamp lit room (not sunlit though). Only the very small projectors for road warriors get expensive for high lumens. But do make sure the brightness is adequate for your environment and do not trust any ratings but your own eyes.
One last comment about projectors. Consider the footprint. I live in a relatively small 1 bedroom apartment in NYC. I have my projetor upside down on the top of a bookshelf and a pulldown screen on the opposite wall. With my environment, space is precious, and this takes essentially none, where a tube TV would consume a whole corner of the room and a large rear projection TV would not fit and to buy a flat panel of the same size would leave me poor.