Slashdot Mirror
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."
Skipping commentary on the Death Of PC Gaming etc., it's interesting to watch as consoles become more like computers as far as the gaming experience goes: compatability problems (never really had those with the NES), online content, weird crashes and errors. The bright side of all this for PC gamers is that we should start seeing fewer games being hobbled because people try to design them for PCs and consoles simultaneously (Deus Ex 2 for the canonical example).
Personally, as a long time PC gamer I can honestly say that "resolution" has never been that much of a consern for me; the thing that bothers me is the artifacts that typically come from low-resolution images. As a result of this I tend to play most of my games at a resolution between 800x600 and 1280x1024 with 8xAA and 8xAF ...
I know this goes against what some people will say but I would rather run a game at 800x600 with 8xAA and 8xAF then have the same game at 1280x1024 with no AA and AF.
Many panels these days used non-HD resolutions (stretched 1024x768 for plasma displays, for instance) or, almost as bad, an "in between" resolution. That's commonly 1366x768.
That ensures that EVERYTHING you watch will be scaled, so you couldn't even have the clarity of watching 720p on a 1280x720 set.
Yet the 1280x720 sets, with lower resolutions, cost more.
Welcome to The Market.
And what's more, given the borderline advertising practices of many companies, a 1024x768 display will probably be advertised as "720p!" too, even though it's really not. But because most people don't know the corresponding horizontal resolution that's supposed to go with 720p, they'll never notice.
I wonder if you have a 1366x768 display, if you could bypass the internal scaler by feeding it a DVI signal from an HTPC, and then use the HTPC to position the 1280x720p frame in the center of the 1366x768 one, thus giving you an unscaled image?
Any TV designer who automatically scales 1280x768 up to 1366x768 without an option to turn it off and just display it with black bars ought to be shot.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
My advice is to watch a wall full of different brands of TV's with content that rapidly changes scenes.
You'll soon be able to pick the ones with the slow image processors - they're the ones that are perceptibly behind the rest.
Of course, this doesn't show the fact that they're *all* behind a little bit, but it does help weed out the crap ones.
You are in a twisty maze of processor lines, all alike.
There is a lot of hype here.
Except that shopping for HDTVs is difficult, because most stores I've been to this season have them set up displaying non-HD content. At one Best Buy I visited, the guy admitted that their antenna didn't pick up any HD channels very well, so the only thing he could show us was 480p.
At another one, everyone was crowded around the one "good looking" TV, because it was the only one displaying an HD image. All the other TVs had been tuned to an analog channel, and looked like crap by comparison.
Until the major-market stores get their act together, it's going to be very difficult to shop for or compare HDTVs in any meaningful way. I went out to look at them in person because I thought it was ridiculous to shop for a TV without going and judging the PQ of various models in person, but I left feeling that it would just be better to shop from specs -- any subjective evaluation would have been rendered meaningless by the poor setup and conditions in stores. (The solution would have been to go to a "real" home theater store, but since I'm probably not going to pay their prices (as much as I'd like to support an independent/local, and feel guilty about it) I've hesitated to visit any.)
Everything about HD is screwy right now. Manufacturers don't know what people want, so there are products out there that are either flat-out crappy or just mis-designed; stores aren't bothering to train their employees about how to explain or sell the new technology, making the job of a potential buyer even harder; not to mention that average people range seem to be ambivalent about the whole upgrade business. HDTV isn't like color, where once you saw it, you understood the change and could go out and buy one; it's an obvious upgrade when it's done right, but it can be a morass if it's not.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
I've had enough problems with LCD displays on laptops and handheld devices that I simply will not buy an LCD television until the manufacturer's dead pixel policy is something other than "It's not a bug, it's a feature!" I'm not going to spend upwards of $1000 for the device's manual to include a note in the Troubleshooting section telling me not to worry about little dots that won't go away.
With that said, personally, I just want an old-fashioned CRT, and I've been tempted by the likes of these. No rear projects or having to rethink A/V furniture, no young technologies that have new and interesting problems that have yet to be acceptably solved (be it dead pixels or greater susceptibility to burn-in), not even a rear projection, just good old-fashioned ions-on-phosphorous, and for a reasonable price. However, I'm relutctant to purchase even these because I've yet to see a direct view CRT that supports 1080p, and I see no point in getting a television that doesn't support features that will probably be worth having in the next ten years.
And speaking of "ten years," I want an appliance, not yet another piece of technology that gets thrown out after 3-4 years. If I cannot be reasonably assured that the television I'm considering buying will neither be obsolete in three years nor outright non-functioning, my NTSC set continues to work (from back when the most complicated question I had while shopping was "What kind of inputs does it have?")