What TV to Buy?

[Skiier__Dude]

IMHO, rather than shell out a wad for a 55+" set, spend half the money and go the ceiling or wall mounted projector route. That way your 55" picture can easily be made to be 100". Projector technology has accelerated over the last few years and for roughly $1000-$1500 you can get a unit with extreme brightness with a very long life bulb that won't break the bank when it needs replacing. They now have every input known to man and the picture quality is as good as anything out there.

You do need about 6-8' between the projector and the wall and a proper projection cloth to project your image onto is recommended. Of course, like any video picture, the more light in the room the worse the picture gets, however, at least you don't get a reflection of daylight off the glass of a TV screen.

Worth taking a long look at this technology...

[dfitz43]

Just quick 0.02 while at work here.

I started with 2nd gen Samsung DLP. Great picture, very sharp, adequately bright, 1:1 pixel mapping over DVI at 1280x720. I was very happy and believed that this was HDTV nirvana.

Decided to build a second (bedroom) client and went looking for a display. Got all excited about the Westinghouse 42" 1920x1080p, ordered it and spent about 2 weeks with it. Very bright image, beautiful with 1080p Windows media clips, very nice with ATSC HD stuff, ok with SD. However, my set, like many (if you read the long thread at AVS) had the uneven backlighting problem, and ultimately that was a deal-breaker for me (even though the problem was subtle). Back the set went.

Ultimately went the plasma route and picked up a Panasonic TH-50PHD8UK (commercial display). Best decision I ever made. Unbelievably vivid and realistic image, not as bright as LCD, but much more 3-dimensional than either LCD or my DLP.

Even my wife (not really that discriminating a viewer) immediately said, "Wow, that's a _great_ picture" the first time she saw HD on the set.

The commercial display is nice in that it is highly adjustable and configurable (comes with component and s-vid inputs, you just buy removable cards for whatever else you want: DVI, HDMI, etc).

Burn-in is still somewhat relevant, but as long as you're reasonably careful (no Windows desktop for 24 hours straight), you should be fine. I think as long as you mix up your viewing and take care to do a fair amount in full screen (and who wouldn't want to use all 1366x768 pixels!), it's very unlikely to be any sort of issue. The panasonic is on its 8th generation and they say that burn-in concern is at the same level as CRT in terms of likelihood (possible, but requires significant abuse).

Most plasmas offer various non-linear stretch modes to fill a 16:9 screen with a 4:3 original AR image. Some people loathe these and will only watch 4:3 in 4:3, for others, it's fine. I watch basically no 4:3, so I don't really care. I do think you want to be careful if you're truly watching 6 hrs a day of 4:3 with the black (or even gray, somewhat better I understand) bars on the sides.

Just one of those cases of shifting standards of excellence for me. When I got the DLP 3 yrs ago, I thought it was awesome. Still very nice image, but it really doesn't compare to the new plasma IMO.

cheers,
Dave

[Humanzee]

Originally Posted by stanger89

You can alwasy set Video Orbit Duration to something other than 0 in Detailed Setup and Sage will move the video around to mitigate the static-image/burn-in effect.

I tried this for a while, but the wife thought the tv was broken. I guess I didn't really need to with an LCD anyway, but it was there so I set it to ~10 minutes. At that time period you don't really notice it moving but the first thing she said when she walked into the room was "What's wrong with the TV?"