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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."
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.
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.
I'm a signature virus. Please copy me to your signature so I can replicate.
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.