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."

Comments

No mention of HDTV lag

[Galaga88]

This article totally neglects to mention any of the issues with HDTV lag. From my understanding, it occurs when the TV has to convert a signal to its native resolution, resulting in a several millisecond delay.

This can be frustrating in action or rhythm games (Which is why Guitar Hero 2 has an option to compensate for it). I don't have an HDTV, so I'm not sure how bad it is but some google-fu should find plenty more on the subject.

Re:No mention of HDTV lag

[theskipper]

On the plus side though, it gives those of us who are sub-par CS players an alternate excuse to blaming ping.

"lucky shot n00b cuz if my tv wasnt lagging..."

Resolution

[mrchaotica]

From the article:

I'd agree with the hype that says once you have played games in HD, it's painful to go back to standard TV.

Wow, this guy finally figured out what us PC gamers have known for about a decade now! Who'da thunk it?

Re:Resolution

[mrchaotica]

See, you've just proven my point: you consider 800x600 to be low resolution! For console gamers, this would be high resolution -- standard for them is 484 interlaced lines. When you start getting that low, it becomes really bad no matter how much anti-aliasing you use. For example, try playing Half-Life on the PS2 sometime. It sucks horribly, mostly due to the low resolution (the remainder of the sucking is due to the horrible controls).

Westinghouse LVM-42W2 is great

[Johnso]

After researching dozens of websites, a dozen stores, and going back and forth between different models, I finally bought an LCD HDTV last month. I decided on the LVM-42W2 from Westinghouse. It has 1080p resolution, tons of inputs (including two DVIs and HDMI for hooking up your laptop) and works flawlessly. I couldn't be happier with the picture and it's by far the best price for a 40"+ 1080p screen.

Re:Westinghouse LVM-42W2 is great

[bockelboy]

Can I hear an "Amen" to that.

Our office bought the LVM-42W2 for video conferencing over the summer. Since then, 4 of us have bought the exact same model. It's got tons of inputs (all the various analog ones, 1 VGA, 2 DVI, 1 HDMI). It can do 1080p. It is cheap - finding it for $1500 is not hard, I think. I haven't run into any quirks.

The difference between the Westinghouse and the $3000 Samsung is that the Samsung has lots of nice filters on it, whereas the Westinghouse only has the standard brightness/contrast/etc. Three points:
1) Your 1080p/1080i source doesn't need any expensive upconverting filter technologies.
2) You'll want a nicer up-converting image for DVD sources. This can be remedied by buying a nice $100 DVD player which does the up-conversion, instead of having the TV do it.
3) Unless you have lots of nice TVs at home already, you won't be able to tell the difference between the Westinghouse and a $3000 set once you get it in your living room. The only way to see that the $3000 set has a marginally better picture is to put them next to each other.
So, the extra $1500 in cost goes away once you take the set home, and in the worst case can be remedied by buying a nice DVD player (cost: $100).

I friggin' love my TV and, at $1500, my wife even let my buy it.

One silver lining for PC people

[Wilson_6500]

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).

He left out something important

[J. T. MacLeod]

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.

HDTV is a clusterfuck.

[Kadin2048]

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.

Stores don't help.

[Kadin2048]

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.

Re:Stores don't help.

[bigpat]

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.

Lone voice in the wilderness

[Guppy06]

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?")