RE: [OT] Samsung Plasma

["Phil Harris" <phil@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

> > Personally I have never seen a plasma with good picture
> quality (sorry
> > all you plasma owners).
>
> Me neither.
>
> > CRT TV is still the bench mark to beat for me.
>
> I was really shocked by the quality of a DLP rear projection
> set in John Lewis yesterday. Sagem I think. It still suffered
> slightly from the problem of poor brightness off the vertical
> axis (ie if you stand in front too close it looks dim), but
> nowhere near as badly as previous RP sets I've looked at.
>
> Comparing it to the array of plasmas they had there, it was
> far far better.
>
> Some of the LCD TVs aren't looking too bad now, but still not
> good enough for the money they're charging. Perhaps next
> year's crop of new LCD sets might be better...
>
> Jim

OK - I've just taken delivery of a Sharp 32GA4E LCD set so here's my
two-pennorth on them...

On current digital sources, LCDs (and to a lesser degree IMO Plasmas too)
can look *REALLY* bad. Both technologies show up poor quality feeds
absolutely mercilessly but LCDs seem to do so to a greater degree. This
seems to be down to the additional digital processing required to both
deinterlace the source signal and to rescale it to the native panel
resolution. This seems to show itself as a very "digital" image -
lots of
blockiness and artefacting - and when watching freeview via Tivo it's
obviously far worse given the fairly poor general quality of a freeview
source, the subsequent uncompression and recompression by Tivo and then the
upscaling from the set itself.

In the real world this means that watching Top Gear on BBC2 through Tivo
this evening (s-video into the AV amp where it's upconverted to component
video for sending to the LCD) was quite a trial - at times the picture
quality was so bad that I considered turning it off - but on the flip side
watching Streetfighter on Channel 5 (for Kylie of course) taking Freeview
straight from my Thomson DHD400 Freeview PVR (again via s-video into the AV
amp where it's upconverted to component video) gives a picture which is
really pretty bloody good (and yes, I'm a fussy bugger too when it comes to
picture quality). There's certainly plenty of black level detail however
the
gamma curve of the LCD tv is very different to that of the CRT set it
replaced which makes it look quite different. I'm looking at getting this
LCD properly colour calibrated which will make one hell of a difference but
that's going to be a while.

Running DVD into the LCD via component video all the way is really crisp
(and I don't have a progressive scan DVD player - just 480i or 576i) with
image issues only appearing on poorly authored discs (excessively
compressed) - good clean discs play back with an increased clarity which is
quite noticeable and stuff like Toy Story 2 (which I watched last night)
was
just superb.

Basically - feed a plasma or an LCD with a poor quality source and it will
show it to you in all its ghastly glory - feed it a good source and it'll
poo all over a CRT set.

Phil