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What Gamers Need To Know About Buying an HD TV
The excellent games coverage at the San Jose Mercury News site offers up a gamers buying guide for HD TVs. Dean Takahashi discusses the basics every HD purchaser should know, some technical issues with recent plasma and LCD advances in mind, and addresses the specific problems that gamers will face with their new purchases. From the article: "If you accidentally set your PS 3 for 1080p resolution, when the TV can only support 720p, you get a black screen. The Westinghouse TV I used displayed a message that said 'invalid format.' To reset the PS3 to the standard AV format, you shut the PS3 off. Then you hold the PS3's power button down for about 10 seconds. It will reset to standard video. If you have the Nintendo Wii, you won't have to upgrade your standard/enhanced definition TV as the Wii's best resolution is 480p. It's thankfully simple, but you get a sixth of the pixels on screen as you do with a full HDTV with a PS3."
From the article:
Wow, this guy finally figured out what us PC gamers have known for about a decade now! Who'da thunk it?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Step One: Get a 5.1 system and an LCD TV that is NATIVE 1080p. If you can't afford that, save up and deal with your crappy 20" for now.
There is no Step Two.
$1000 for a Dell? I don't think so - not if you plan on actually getting anything decent gaming-wise.
Last time I priced out a machine like the one you're talking about, it was closer to $2k - and that was without a monitor. Dell charges at least 50% more than what the parts would cost if you built the system yourself. For instance, you can save yourself a chunk of change right from the start by only putting in the minimum amount of RAM you can buy into your Dell, then going to Kingston or Crucial's website and order the memory you really want. They're the same chips that Dell uses, only you pay twice as much if you buy the memory from Dell!
About the only thing you'd be missing out on would be the case. Dell does make good cases. But at the same time, you also save yourself the agony of trying to uninstall all the extra garbage that every pre-built system comes with nowadays. You're going to do a fresh install anyways, so you might as well just build the system yourself and do it right the first time, rather than having to correct Dell's mistakes.
Dell's are great machines if you're running an office, or need a worry-free PC for a family member living far away, but as a gamer, you can (and should) do better.
It is cheap - finding it for $1500 is not hard, I think.
What frame of existence do you live in that says $1500 for a TV is cheap?
When my current TV (27") dies and I can replace it for $300 I'll do it.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
I had a similar disappointing experience both at Circuit City and Best Buy. One problem that the Circuit City sales person explained was that they didn't have a 1080p source for putting on all the 1080p HDTVs, because of the stupid copy restrictions which downgrade a signal to 720p when it is not hooked up through a unsplittable HDMI connection. So, they would have had to have each tv hooked up to a seperate 1080p video source and couldn't just split the signal from one player. He also said that some manufacturers provided individual 1080p capable DVRs with preloaded content, which looked pretty nice, but that the contract for the demo equipment stipulated that it would not be used on any other manufacturers TVs. So, for example they couldn't show me what a 1080p picture would look like on any of the Sharp 1080p HDTVs because they contractually couldn't just switch over a demo device from another manufacturer and the biggest problem was that the store was too cheap and the sales people too lazy to make one demo 1080p player available that could have been moved to each TV that you wanted to see in 1080p. Seemed pretty stupid to me, if you are going to sell these tvs for a lot of money, then you should at least be able to demo them. Ideally, there would be a box connected to each one that allowed you to see how each different input 1080p, 1080i, 720p and 480p all looked on the TV.
It does suck that they couldn't just run a 1080p signal to all of the 1080p TVs from one source. Really makes me worried that the new 1080p TVs are just too wrapped up in HDCP to be worth the extra expense. I'd rather have analog back if it means that we will actually be allowed to see a better picture, instead of being stuck with some unrealized capability of doing so.
It's all about the graphics. Why do people spend $1500+ on gaming PCs when a $500 PC will play virtually all of the newest games at playable speeds (>15fps) once you turn the graphics down to bare minimum?