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HDTV Expert Alfred Poor Tells You What to Buy and What Not to Buy (Video)
Alfred Poor's website is called HDTV Almanac. That's where he talks about the latest HDTV industry news and changes. He also writes about HDTVs and monitors for a variety of industry publications and does some marketing consulting for manufacturers in the field. In this 17 minute video, Alfred tells us what features we should look for in our next TV buy and which ones aren't worth spending extra money on. He also says that for a variety of non-technical reasons, you might want to consider buying your next TV between now and June -- and says you should think about getting a 3D TV even if there aren't many 3D TV shows you want to watch right now.
In a couple of lines, what does he say?
Please buy the TVs whose manufacturers pay me more $$$ for.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Due to a (somewhat) rare eyesight condition, 3D doesn't work on me. I have two working eyes, just one doesn't see as well as the other so my vision is way off balanced to the right. I am also fairly near-sighted. Day-to-day, this causes me absolutely no trouble at all. I can't wear glasses (doesn't help), so I make do with just getting closer to things.
Anyhoo, it never stopped me from being able to use a computer. Standard font sizes on standard monitors were fine, I could read them just fine. However, as displays have gotten higher and higher resolutions, I'm finding it harder and harder to read them. My eyesight hasn't got any worse, it's just that things are getting smaller.
Despite all of the advances in Technology for the differently abled, such as DPI settings in windows, it doesn't actually help. Adjusting DPI breaks so many apps that it's more trouble than it's worth. 3D seems to be the big new thing everyone wants you to buy and I can only pray that it fails so badly, people just give up trying to sell it. I worry because if 3D becomes the "standard", there's possibly going to be a shift towards content that is only /i>3D, in much the same way that content has shifted to "HD everything", meaning I'm screwed.
So, for little ol' me, don't buy into 3D. Please.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
Given the size of my living room, a 720p 50" Sony I bought years ago is doing just fine. It doesn't need 1080p, because at the distance I'm sitting from it, the eye can't tell the difference anyways.
http://s3.carltonbale.com/resolution_chart.html
My dad purchased his Samsung 55" LCD 3D TV with glasses for $2200. I purchased my Samsung 51" Plasma 3D TV w/ glasses in December for $599 at BestBuy. I always try to find the best deal, not the latest and greatest.
-- By all means let's be open-minded, but not so open-minded that our brains drop out.
I've found the tunable 3rd party glasses (Monster MV3D or XPAND X104) require significantly less head leveling. FWIW.
(BTW if you are buying for 3D, DLP is the better performer in this space, despite what manufacturers say about their LED/LCD/Plasma refresh rates. Problem being you can no longer get a DLP set smaller than huge.)
Someone had to do it.
BTW - this guy is no expert.
Who submitted this shite anyway? Oh, there was no submitter - it's a slashvertisement brought to you by roblimo. Can we have a way to down-mod stories? We've only been asking for that for years and years and years now. It would be better than those stupid anti_social_media buttons.
Let's call it what it is, Anti-Social Media.
3D wasn't expensive to develop at all, that's the lie.
3D is just a high refresh rate and an IR transmitter sync'd to vsync to flip which image each eye sees.
This isn't high tech, it was done long ago, including in video games in the early 90's.
- Michael T. Babcock (Yes, I blog)
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Either:
a North American game in which a ball is normally carried by hand and passed from hand-to-hand;
The North American game ("Gridiron Football") is so named because when the game was invented, the ball was 12 inches (1 foot) long from tip to tip. The modern ball is 11.5 inches because it makes the forward pass easier.
or:
a rest-of-the-world game in which a ball is controlled and passed by use of foot or head.
The game you're talking about ("Association Football") gets its name from being played on foot. (As opposed to on horseback, like polo.)
Yes, 4K television is under development. ("4K" is roughly equivalent to 4 times the resolution of 1080p, for those not familiar with the term.) I would not recommend waiting for 4K for several reasons. First, people are fine with watching DVDs (which are standard definition) on their HDTVs right now, and don't even bother getting the Blu-ray version of a movie (which is high definition). They tend to sit too far from the screen for its size, which means that they can't see the added detail anyway. They're not going to sit twice as close (or get a set twice as large) in order to get the extra detail that 4K offers. And we're probably at least 10 years away -- if that -- from having a distribution system (broadcast and physical media) that can get the image to your set in the first place. So I'm not going to postpone my purchase just for 4K technology.
Alfred Poor
HDTV Almanac
If you are in the marked for a TV right now: 1) You probably want a larger TV than you think. (It should be like a move it theater...) 2) Smart TV is not really worth an additional cost, as ROKU (or similar) are trivial to add. 3) You probably want to get a 3D TV, because a TV lasts 5-10 years & in two there will be content. 3a) There are 3 types of 3D: Funky battery powered glasses, Passive glasses (like in the movie theatre); no glasses (but you have to be sitting in a specific space, or it won't look right).
Actually, most modern 3D technology does not require you to keep your head perfectly level. Older 3D glasses that used linear polarization showed crosstalk if you tipped your head but this is not the case with the modern technology. "Active" (shutter) glasses (the somewhat clunky ones) work perfectly well with moderate tips of the head, although your brain gets confused if you tip your head completely sideways (because the parallax is not in the direction that your brain expects from the position of your eyes). Most modern passive 3D systems use circular polarization, which is similarly insensitive to head angle.
A 16" screen, at lap distance (say, 18") is about 40 degrees of visual arc. About the same as a 50" screen at 4.5 feet. Assuming that Moryath's living room is bigger than 10 feet (maybe even bigger than 15 feet), your experience with a laptop screen does not apply to his experience.
TItle: Industry Expert Alfred Poor Gives HDTV Buying Advice
Description: There are features you need and some you don't
[00:00] <TITLE>
A "Slashdot TV" logo appears in the bottom left with "An Interview with Alfred Poor of HDTV Almanac" to its right.
"What mistakes do / people make when / they buy an HDTV?" zooms into view.
[00:04] Alfred>
The biggest one they make of all is not buying [...]
[00:06] <TITLE>
A webcam picture of Alfred Poor fades into view.
[...] the right size TV.
A lot of people were trained - I don't know about you, but I was trained, growing up, to not sit too close to the TV - it's going to ruin your eyes.
In fact, I was taught: hold your palm out so that if it covers up the screen, then you're at the right distance.
That's great for the old-fashioned standard definition TV but it's not the right move at all for HDTV.
I try to tell people to think in terms of going to the movies; You don't sit all the way in the back of the theater so that you can cover up your screen with your hand - You want an immersive experience, where you're enveloped by the image.
That's the same thing you want at home.
For most people, they typically get a screen that's a lot smaller than what they really should have.
There are a lot of rules of thumb out there - some of them are wrong, but they basically.. if you're gonna be sitting about 6 feet away, you need at least a 42" screen.
A 47" screen would be even better.
So, that's one of the big mistakes that people make.
Now the prices have come down so much that a larger screen doesn't cost that much more.
So I encourage people to buy probably the next size up from what they they ought to get.
[01:22] <TITLE>
"Are HDTV prices going / to keep on going down?" fades in and out of view. These titles appear throughout the video.
[01:28] Alfred>
Actually, the story is that the prices have been coming down very steadily.
They've been coming down almost 20%/year, for the last 4 or 5 years.
If there's one business that I would not want to be in, it would be manufacturing HDTVs.
It's a brutal, brutal business.
We've seen Pioneer get out of it.
Panasonic is backpedaling, even though they have this huge commitment to plasma screens.
SONY is trying to figure out how not to make their own anymore, just job it all out to somebody else in China.
Philips doesn't make 'm anymore - they've just loaned the name to somebody else to stick on their sets.
On and on and on - it's a brutal, brutal business.
We've got Samsung, we've got LG - you've got a handful who are doing a good job of making a go at it, but they're probably losing a lot of money on it also.
So the price has been coming down pretty steadily.
Will they keep coming down?
Well, each year I say they just can't keep coming down any more than they have, just because you get all the materials' cost.
And yet, they continue to do so.
I think it's gotta slow down - I think we're probably getting near the bottom.
If we see cuts at this point, it'll be more due to distress than increased efficiency.
It will be because there'll be either retailers or manufacturers who are stuck with inventory and trying to get some cash out of it, rather than sit there having to pay interest on the inventory.
Though having said that, we're gonna see a bunch of good opportunities, probably in the next 3 or 4 months, to get some very good deals on HDTVs.
Sears has announced that they're gonna be closing a whole lot of stores, and that could put a whole lot of product into the channel at low prices as they try to liquidate some of that inventory.
Each store is gonna have several of each model on hand.
So you're talking about hundreds of sets right there.
If Sears starts advertising prices that are way low, well Best Buy, Costco, they're gonna have to follow them right down into the mountain, so that they don't give up market share.
[03:44] <TITLE>
What's the HDTV
BS, I'll buy that you can't tell the difference between 720p and 1080p beyond 10-12' but the difference between SD and HD is very, very noticeable on a 42" set even at ~16' (distance from my tv to our typical sitting position on the couch).
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
The rest of your description is likewise meaningless. At 12 feet from the TV on a 50" screen, you CAN NOT physically tell the difference. It is impossible, your eyes don't have the resolution to handle it, and telling yourself otherwise is like telling yourself you need some $10,000 ethernet cables for your home network too.
This is not true. The acuity numbers you base this on (from the article linked earlier) are related to vision tests like you might undergo at an optometrist, where the measure is the smallest size text you are able to read at a given distance. "Nominal" vision in this case is 20/20, which means that the subject can resolve letters 20mm high at a distance of 20 feet - this is where the 1 arc-minute of visual acuity your linked article mentions appears to come from (and never mind that people have been measured with vision down to 20/8, which would reduce this significantly - about 0.4 arc-minutes).
This is useful information, but it doesn't actually mean what you seem to be claiming - that we can see no difference in features smaller than this, and any greater resolution is wasted. In tests where subjects are assessing whether two lines line up, acuity down to about 8 arc-seconds has been observed, which is actually better resolution than the physical receptors on the retina. Similarly, a single dark line against an evenly illuminated background can be observed down to a limit of about 0.5 arc-seconds, much finer than the physical detectors in the eye.
This isn't to say that we need displays capable of sub-1 arc-second resolution, but human vision is far more complicated than you make it out to be. Saying that there is no difference between a 720p display and a 1080p display at x distance and size because the pixels are too small to be individually resolved (based on results from a test for resolving letters) is simply not true. Most people probably can detect a difference, even if the difference is too small for them to really notice in moving pictures (or are just not bothered by it). Claiming that no one can see any difference and therefore anyone who doesn't follow that simplistic chart is an idiot is, simply, false.