Jump to content

What television is in your living room?


Pete Raynell

Recommended Posts

I'm moving house and in the market for a new TV...

OLED, LCD, Plasma, Ultra HD, Full HD, HD , the options and brands seem overwhelming!

So I thought what better place to ask than here what most of you guys have in your home to get and idea of what to look into.

Thanks in advance!

Pete

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

It's probably about five or six years old. I got it because it has a feature called CineFrame or something -- I suspect it is sort of the opposite of motion flow smoothing / interpolation, it probably drives the monitor at 48 Hz instead of 60 or 120 Hz so that 24 fps material looks more like film projection motion.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think Plasmas are great, got one, I just stick a HDMI into my MacBook, watch something from Netflix or iTunes and the quality is great. It took me a while to get a decent sound system as I prefer not to use the built in one to the television.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I think Plasmas are great, got one, I just stick a HDMI into my MacBook, watch something from Netflix or iTunes and the quality is great. It took me a while to get a decent sound system as I prefer not to use the built in one to the television.

I've got a 55" last generation Panasonic Plasma. Fantastic picture. Black levels almost pitch black and images seem "3d" compared to LCD. Great viewing angles. ABL is hard to notice (energy saving dimming of bright frames). Sound is awful. Needs separate sound system. At 55", 4k is not needed. And lastly, it's very very heavy.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

I have a 47" Sony Bravia 1080P monitor. The image is great but it has developed a thin vertical blue line on the left side of the screen...

That means one of the 5,760 digital-to-analog converters along the top of the panel.has died, and it's unfortunately unrepairable.

I still find it unbelievable that a 1920 x 1080 panel has 5,760 soldered connections along the top and another 1,080 down the side, soldered onto metallized glass. The flexible PC Board tracks they solder on are barely visible with the naked eye, and yet they manage to get them all aligned and soldered into place, and they work year-in year-out with remarkably few failures.

And a 4K panel has 11,520 + 2160!

When LCD TVs first came out I was wondering what the actual panel service life was going to be, and it greatly exceeded everybody's expectations. The only thing that was more incredible was the way the prices plummeted in just a few years

I've repaired quite a few LCD TVs that have been given to me "for parts", and ironically, it's rarely the panel that's faulty; it's nearly always just a few dollars worth of parts in the power supply module. :rolleyes:

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

I'm a projector guy, have been for my 15 years. I'm currently running an Optoma HD25LV, which is a great deal (around $899 referb) for a 20,000:1 contrast, 3,500 lumen, super quiet HD projector.

My normal home theater is a slightly under 7 foot wide wall. I also have a perfect white screen that's a little under 6 feet wide. I rarely use the screen, only when I need perfect colors for checking work.

However, I can turn the room on it's side and get a 12 foot wide image if need be. I've done this move twice and it's tricky, takes about 30 minutes to set up, but if I'm having a crowd over, it's worth while.

 

I'm excited about the UHD laser projectors for home theater coming soon. I will re-invest in 2 - 4 years because I'm producing a lot of UHD content these days and it's nice to see it projected properly, instead of a down-res. I also think the 1080p DLP chips in these current projectors need more mirrors. Even though I wouldn't be projecting 1080p content all the time, I think the extra mirrors will help smoothen the image out.

 

interstellar.JPG

 

 

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Sound is awful. Needs separate sound system.

I've been using mission speakers and a NAD 3020i stereo. I've just connected my TV up to what I use to play records and it helps so much! I don't think I can ever go back to using a TV's built in audio system.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I've been using mission speakers and a NAD 3020i stereo. I've just connected my TV up to what I use to play records and it helps so much! I don't think I can ever go back to using a TV's built in audio system.

I'm using my Infinity loudspeakers that I bought in 1976... No surround sound, just two channel. For movies, a sub woofer might be helpful if i would want to shake the entire house...

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

I've got a 55" last generation Panasonic Plasma. Fantastic picture. Black levels almost pitch black and images seem "3d" compared to LCD. Great viewing angles. ABL is hard to notice (energy saving dimming of bright frames). Sound is awful. Needs separate sound system. At 55", 4k is not needed. And lastly, it's very very heavy.

It's funny that virtually no manufacturer gives you what would be an extremely useful feature: Audio line output jacks where the signal level tracks the level set by the volume control. A few sets have a stereo earphone jack that does this, but that's very much the exception; most of them have fixed-level headphone out.

It makes an external speaker setup vastly easier to use, and particularly with modern wafer-thin TV designs, even the cheapest and nastiest stereo setup is going to sound a hell of a lot better than the microscopic. internal speakers. Actually just adding a sub-woofer of any size often makes a significant improvement.

(Strictly speaking, they're really just "external bass drivers"; you can't actually hear the output from a true "Sub-Woofer", you can only feel it :-)

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

Panasonic Plasma, 5 years old 1080p.

 

I absolutely detest LCD, not keen on 4k and as for 3D....Pfffft.

 

Still got an old 36" Sony tube job somewhere, best skintones ever......

 

Maybe I'll covert to OLED when this one dies as I do like my Small HD DP7 for shooting, but I hope its a while yet before that happens

Link to comment
Share on other sites

So why exactly are you guys up on plasma and down on LCD?

 

And why doesn't Best Buy even sell plasma anymore?

The "newest" plasma displays have very deep black levels that LCD can not match. (in a dark room the blacks on my display are as dark as the surrounding black frame of the tv) Also, the angle of view is much larger.

 

Plasmas are more expensive to make, and are very heavy... so not much consumer demand. And OLED is here which has many of the advantages of plasma.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

  • Premium Member

So why exactly are you guys up on plasma and down on LCD?

 

And why doesn't Best Buy even sell plasma anymore?

"And why doesn't Best Buy even sell plasma anymore?"

 

When flat panel displays first came on the market Plasma was all there really was, and the first ones were ludicrously expensive, very unreliable and gave a pretty ordinary picture compared to even run-of-the-mill CRT TVs.

 

The first LCD panels were even worse with noticeable image lag and terrible off-axis viewing.

 

However, around 2004-5 the quality of LCDs improved dramatically, to the point where for the average consumer there was no longer any discernible difference between the two technologies, except that LCD displays were generally much brighter and full-HD panels could be manufactured in smaller screen sizes than was possible for Plasma. Sony abandoned Plasma displays in 2006.

 

Because of the enormous amount of investment that had been poured into Plasma panel infrastructure, the manufacturers trotted out all kinds of BS to try to extract a little more life from the technology, but as far as the average consumer is concerned, LCD was more than good enough, and the TVs were much thinner and lighter. Unfortunately, Plasma panel factories can only be used for making Plasma panels, and so none of the manufacturers ever made any money out of it; the big push to justify Plasma was more an effort to minimize losses. They simply had no way of knowing that LCDs were going to improve so much in both quality and price, and how fast this was going to happen.

 

(In the 1990s, most manufacturers assumed that in the 21st century Digital TV was going to be largely based around CRT TVs, with flat panels as the "Top Shelf" option for people with more money than sense. This is why so many Digital TV standards were based around interlaced scanning, which for all practical purposes, no longer exists....)

 

"So why exactly are you guys up on plasma and down on LCD?"

There is always going to be a certain mentality keen to assert that they have some sort of superior cognitive powers that allows them to discern qualities not obvious to us mere mortals, but they're the same sort of people who claim that their music listening experience is magically enhanced by ridiculously expensive speaker cables that you could use to start a truck motor with.

 

(I've had people pointing at MPEG artifacts and claiming that was a characteristic of "inferior" LCD technology. The only thing it proves to me is that, yes, it does indeed make you go blind... :rolleyes: )

 

As for OLED, this has been over-hyped somewhat. It's significant that Samsung have now abandoned large-screen OLED research, after years of leading the field with their AMOLED phone displays.

While OLEDs are theoretically capable of an infinite brightness range, in practice, most OLED panels are based on existing LCD driver technology, which usually only has a 6-bit dynamic range. (That is, 64 brightness levels). The major difference is that OLEDs can switch completely off so making the screen completely black, but that doesn't really seem all that important to the average consumer.

 

Also, Quantum Dot LCD backlights now give almost the same colour gamut as OLED, but without the risk of the OLED organic polymers degrading over time.

 

But again, for most people, ordinary white LEDs are more than good enough.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Create an account or sign in to comment

You need to be a member in order to leave a comment

Create an account

Sign up for a new account in our community. It's easy!

Register a new account

Sign in

Already have an account? Sign in here.

Sign In Now
×
×
  • Create New...