So I'm In the Market For An HDTV - Page 2

Problem is the viewing conditions in stores are more often then not crap and they are often very poorly calibrated if calibrated at all. Often calibrated to impress rather or trying to enhance crappy tv broadcasts. I have yet to acquire a LCD TV that hasn´t required a lot of tweaking to get the most out of. I put much more stock in reviews and measurements for video gear then audio gear for this reason.

Quote:

Originally Posted by lilkoolaidman 

I don't care what anyone says, Vizios are very good TVs.

 

They have a good number of documented failures after only a few years.  Could be model or make, not sure.  Price to picture ratio isn't good enough for me to take the risk to see if I get lucky.  Vizio is not doing anything magical to offer the picture, performance and reliability that Sony and others can do for less.  It doesn't take much for a TV to stop working.  Just cutting costs on the amount of solder used is enough and quite common. 

 

Just walk into your local Best Buy, Walmart, or whatever and see whichever one LOOKS the best. About the only thing that I look for is whether the blacks look black, and if colors are vivid (not glowing, but not washed out either).

 

That's about the worst advice you can give.  They are usually never ever calibrated and give you little idea of what they can or should look like.  Plus you don't know how the routing and splitting is being handled and they run different sources often.

 

The Sharp Quattron is an interesting Idea but every time I see one, it looks unnaturally yellow, like all the people on screen have jaundice or something.

 

Same answer, poor or no calibration.  You can adjust the yellow levels down to nothing if you like.

I'm also not sure where the idea of 1080p being useless for a 30" monitor comes from.  Maybe some mean overkill.  I have a 30" 2560x1600 screen that uses a Teranax HQV upscaler and it has one of the best pictures I've seen.  Poor conversions can be bad but pixel density is always a good thing if done right.  Look at the Apple retina display.  Is that useless?  A good way to see this is if you have PiP.  Just put an HD signal into a smaller PiP window and look at how sharp and detailed it looks.

I have a 60inch Sharp Quattron LED (actually i think I have that exact model from the youtube clip above) and an older 52inch Sharp LCD so as you can see I am a Sharp fanboy... but only because I couldn't afford Samsung. I believe Samsung TVs are head and shoulders above the rest (LED &LCD) but at the time I bought my Sharp 60inch the comparative Samsung model was almost 85% more money. I bought my grandmother a 47inch top of the line Samsung for almost the same price as my 60inch but that TV looks better than real life. I think you should consider a 4Xinch Samsung you definitely wont regret it, and I was looking prices have fallen a lot since I was buying you could get that TV for around $700. As for receivers I have the Onkyo SR608 and Yamaha V667 which were the 2 rivals to each other like 1 year ago, I prefer my Yamaha. The thing you have to worry about with Onkyo receivers is overheating especially if you are putting it in a cabinet like i did, and they also seem kinda low tech compared to competitors. If you can afford it go for Yamaha, Denon, Pioneer, and of course Marantz over Onkyo.

I have both a Sharp and Samsung Hi-Def TVs. Both have been trouble free and have excellent picture quality

I don't know where you guys shop that the TVs aren't calibrated because at my local WalMart and BJ's Dsicount Warehouse every display TV is perfect. You can't sell TVs if the demo model picture looks like crap.

You can so there is seldom stores that do seem to calibrate them. You may have gotten lucky with your store but it´s far from the norm.

One thing to show how inexperienced they often are is that they show 3D displays where the lamps interferr with the 3D glasses giving the illusion there is flicker. That is not the way to sell in 3D displays lol

Quote:

Originally Posted by fatcat28037 

I have both a Sharp and Samsung Hi-Def TVs. Both have been trouble free and have excellent picture quality

 

I don't know where you guys shop that the TVs aren't calibrated because at my local WalMart and BJ's Dsicount Warehouse every display TV is perfect. You can't sell TVs if the demo model picture looks like crap.

Reading that made me think I passed through the looking glass.  I want you to ask the Walmart rep to see the calibration disc they use, I'd be shocked if they could produce one.

I assure you the stores here in California have fields of big screens.  Like a digital forest.

On another note, I swa Samsung's interpretation of 3D for the first time a few days ago.  IO tend to avoid the brand for personal reasons.  Am I the only one that things the image looks like a children's pop-up book rather than proper 3D?  It was like rows of 2D images layered over each other.  Wth?

Quote:

Originally Posted by Anaxilus 

That's about the worst advice you can give.  They are usually never ever calibrated and give you little idea of what they can or should look like.  Plus you don't know how the routing and splitting is being handled and they run different sources often.

 

This is true, but it does give you an idea on how the TV looks over all, and whether or not it looks like something you can adjust, like if the blacks look washed out and there's a lot of clouding, it's probably due to bad backlighting. I also realized that the stores probably have the Quattron TVs with yellows all the way up to say "look at how vivid the yellows are", but I've seen them three times all in different retailers and they looked a little too yellow to me (again, I could just turn the yellows to 0). I think in the same way that if you were looking at getting some B&W P5s and went into an Apple store to try them out, the songs would most likely be all in 128 and they probably wouldn't be songs you're particularly familiar with, and not to mention the noisy atmosphere of most Apple stores, but it would give you an idea of what it sounds like.

I also agree with what you're saying about "3D" TVs, until they can come out with an actual 3D TV with shape, instead of 2D put into a foreground, middle-ground, and background, I'm not interested and hope they fade away.
 

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying Sharp and Quattron is the best screen out there, there are some issues.   I was a disbeliever for the same reasons.  Just happened upon a nice deal on a 40" and decided to see if I could make something of it.  Surprised me compared to all the out of the box screens I've seen of it.  If you want the absolute best LEDTV, I haven't seen better than the Bravia XBR-HX929 I saw at CES last year.  That was pretty impressive.

http://ces.cnet.com/8301-32254_1-20026993-283.html

A lot of the TVs they have the brightness way way way up. So that there is lack of blackness is not a good way to check out tvs in stores. If they use dynamic contrast it´s easy to get blackness and then you can get really fooled by then being annoyed by fake contrast in your more controlled home area. Dynamic contrast has traditionally been there to give impressive specs and I still don´t believe in that practise. First thing I do when getting a LCD TV is killing brightness to more natural levels. If you are looking for a 3D TV you do however want it to be capable of being really really bright to compensate for the glasses that shut out the light intake quite a bit.

If the backlight is to grey it may just be a factor of reducing the strength of it which also increase the lifespan on it if you are not a gearhead that plan to upgrade often.

As for 3D yes the demo discs I seen on them they often show this 2D layering. Not just Samsung though but well they are often up on show.  I think it´s to give fewer focus points for the eyes so the 3D isn´t as fatiguing and the image get a bit sharper but it looks ridiculous and not really more realistic then just 2D. I don´t like that kind of 3D at all. I want them to give a more natural depth perspective. Watching upsampled DVD discs on my PC I managed to get insanely realistic looking 3D actually beating some of the bluray 3D discs I got but they are fatiguing to watch due to to many focus points I believe. But it really amazed me that it was possible to get it so good with realtime processing while they can fail so much in Alice in Wonderland 3D. That movie isn´t filmed with 3D cameras though but still...  

Speaking of Sharp the new Elite is getting some good press. I have been spending the last month looking at television at stores and reading until nose bleed. I did see some Sharp Quattro that the store tried to push but what they showed just left me cold. I totally realize it doesn´t necessary have to mean much how due to need for calibration and all that.

The tvs that impressed me the most was the Samsung plasmas as in D6905 and upwards and the Panasonic VT 30. In one place they where side by side and I could hardly distinguish the two from eachother trying to focus on black levels, motions, colours etc. In day light it was hard to see signs of the reported better black levels of the VT 30 and they looked very similar regarding movements, colours and all. Very life like. They outshined everything around them. Both the VT 30 and the Samsungs did impress in store after store. I didn´t find the images lacking brightness or anything except for 3D but that was expected. Watching 3D in daylight on a VT 30 is not really possible unless you wash out the blacks so they turn grey but it should be okay in my batcave I hope. I couldn´t test the 3D of the samsungs sadly. 

Had zoomed in on the D7005 since you could get a 59" for a lot less then a 55" VT 30. However I ended up getting a VT 30 someone else have rejected probably for about the same cost. Just 2 meter from the tv anyway and the 55" paper I put on the wall look scary enough. I don´t really feel the 32" look that small either so I don´t think I will miss those inches much... But of course justifying of purchase is really active at the moment. Still not cheap. I do hope the bigger mass of the VT 30 means it´s better built and will last longer then the Samsung since I am not purchasing new tvs all that often.

Even though I believe it's been discontinued I remember seeing a Pioneer Elite in stores while browsing about a year and a half back, not sure if they got bought out by Panasonic or what not but by far the most amazing Plasma I have seen. 

In black level and contrast no plasma has beaten the latest Kuros yet. It seem to be what the plasma lovers enjoy the most. Brothers have two pairs and yes hard to find any fault in them I would be more then overjoyed if I can get the VT30 to measure up on top.

Panasonic bought a lot of patents and some of the engineers went over to Panasonic. Using some of the tech in the Kuros but not the ones responsible for the black levels of the Kuros. Have a different business model it appears.

Quote:

Originally Posted by oqvist 

Have a different business model it appears.

Yup, a model that doesn't bleed cash forcing them out of the market.  Glad the Panny is working out.  

On a side note.  A 4 year old Samsung LCD is banding and beginning to crap out.  Seems usually to be a thermal management issue affecting solder or other components IME.  Anyway, it's the third Samsung monitor I'm intimately familiar with to crap out prematurely which is why I won't buy Samsung (among other reasons) unless its a hard drive or maybe...maybe a cell phone.

So I need some advice as Google is not being kind.  I'd like a replacement with the following features:

1-1080p

2-30"-40"

3-LED

4-Not Samsung unless that's the only alternative

5-Picture in Picture

6-DVI input!  (HDMI is unacceptable for PC input)

Thanks in advance.

That is a question I have. VT30 is supposedly awful using VGA. Locked at 1366x768 just for one thing but DVI to HDMI cables should work in theory? My GTX 580 has a mini hdmi output as well. However think it´s only for audio? The cable I got is about 1 metre so not sure I will be able to test it.

But as in DVI output haven´t stumbled upon that during my research.. Maybe some HannsG monitor I read about several years ago.I suppose it´s in the PC monitor sections you would have to look to find that and a TV tuner. For some reason VGA is favoured.

As for monitors crapping out yes from reports from stores they do mention Samsung get a lot of returns. They do sell a lot of tvs so partly that but a lot of returns is for bleeding (non uniform backlighting for their leds. Their old plasmas had some peeling issue.

There is also a Sony KDL40W4500 that appear to self destruct after 2,5 years. If I would fanboy about a brand it would have to be Sony still though. All Sony monitors I have owned have never broken on me. Have a heavy dinosaur 29 inch Trinitron CRT that still holds after 15+ years. The Sony CRT monitors same story and my 6 year old Bravia 1 LCD TV show no sign of wear except for the reduced backlight and hardly any bleeding visible. They have been in the budget segment for some time but now they seem to feel they should do super expensive tvs again.

As for Panasonic they have shut down two fabrics or is in the process to. At least one oriented to plasma so they don´t appear to do all that well just like Sony. Flattest tv wins it appears nowadays which mean Samsung and LG.

IF you are going to call out a brand for having a ton of failures you need to back it up with an article and actual data that says their tvs are failing at an above normal rate.

Personally i don't care for any of them, Rear and Front projection for me now, besides LCD for computer monitors.