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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.
Manufacturers really should get over their 3D complex. Sure, they spent a lot on it, R&D and Marketing, but it does more harm than whatever gimmick-value it provides...
Alfred Poor...says you should think about getting a 3D TV... .
Thank you summary, you just saved me 17 minutes by letting me know that Alfred Poor is a tool.
Poor advice. There is no need for anyone to buy anything beyond a HDTV. This is all marketing BS delivered by a corporate-paid shill.
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!
If you are going to post "advertorial" content SLASHDOT, at least mark it as such. I just lost some respect for this site.
When they figure out how to do 3D TV's which don't require that I wear clunkly glasses and keep my head perfectly level, I'll consider buying a 3D TV. Until then, the 42" LG flatscreen that I bought 5 years ago works perfectly well. It does 1080p, the picture is bright enough and clear enough, and it has 2 component video inputs and 3 HDMI, which is better than a lot of TV's on the market today.
For the foreseeable future, I don't see any reason to replace it unless it decides to shuffle off its mortal coil.
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
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.
>People are going to buy anyways. No one actually needs to tell consumers to consume. Supply attempts to meet demand.
Many people would disagree with you. The US consumer confidence index, while in the rise, has been pretty damned low for the past few years. Unfortunately, the US economy is largely reliant on rampant consumerism. Lack of consumer confidence means consumers are less likely to spend money, less spending of money by consumers is bad for the US economy.
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
I doubt very much he has his 50" TV on his lap.
Seriously, why do people find the fact that the eye's resolving power is measured in seconds of arc so difficult to comprehend? You need to know number of dots, screen size AND viewing distance to make any meaningful statements.
And that goes double for the "photographers" who think you need Z number of megapixels for an X x Y print.
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.