Which Plasma To Select

JimBRICK

if you havnet touched or seen a tv DON'T comments on it.

LuSh

Plasma benefits over LCD in regards to picture quality....

Better contrast
Accurate Grayscale
Better reproduction of color
High scanning rate

I've looked at 5 1080p screens at the 2006 CES...1080p at this time doesn't mean much as almost nothing on the market (save Blu Ray and HD DVD) is natively displayed at 1080p. Again, LCD has advantages over Plasma, just not in regards to picture quality

Normanality

Interesting 'discussion'

I've been looking pretty seriously at something in the 42-50" size mostly for tv purposes.

I happen to stop in a Runco dealer and was amazed at the picture quality of the 1080p LCD. For $4000 I suppose it better be good!

The 1080i/720p Runco plasma was nothing to sneeze at either. Both had picture qualities better than any I've seen at the retail stores.

Their digital processor 'resizer' that converts 4:3 to widescreen did a remarkable job on the plasma and the picture didn't look distorted at all.

I left impressed but confused about what would fit my needs best. The most I would need is 720p for digital cable as I'm not a movie person.

JimBRICK

actually I dont have an lcd on the floor with more than an 8ms refresh rate

and unless your running bluray or ps3 720p is all you need

LuSh

JimBrick - I use to sell televisions hence my brief training with ISF tech's have you ever been present for an ISF calibration? Do you know how long it takes to calibrate a television? Did your rep's pull out a $6000 light meter to accurately calibrate the televisions Kelvin using a laptop computer? Better yet, what kelvin did they set the television to? Toshiba is pulling out of Plasma because they just sold their stake in SED to Canon, they have the plants to support LCD. Did your rep tell you that? I've also been to Vegas for CES where I was lucky enough to watch a $40k Runco 1080p front projector dislpay onto a custom made screen. George Luca's personally allowed a 3minute 1080p master cut of Star War's Episode 3 to be shown for a 2 day viewing.

To summarize: I know what I'm talking about.

LCD is winning much like VHS won the Beta war, not because of quality but because of other advantages.

JimBRICK

LOL Did you use a 6000 buck light meter on the tv in your house. you make me laugh. I'm SEEING these side by side. Same picture, same source, same cables. you dont need a 6000 buck light meter to know when something is showing a better picture. even OUT OF THE BOX all fired up from the factory the lcd look WAY better.

dont be mad cause someone talked you into buying a plasma we all make mistakes

LuSh

I've been arguing with a teenager...I've already mentioned I owned an LCD...I've made my points; its clear to most on this forum that I know what I'm talking about and you don't. Have a nice day.

Holydoc

JimBRICK wrote:

ok if you read my post you'd see that ALL our tvs have been personally calibrated by the representative from each company we sell. We have a TV room which is darkened with little light to show ALL the tv's the same. ALL the tv's are showing the same picture from the same HD source. We have over 300000 in tv's over the size of 32 inch probably the biggest selection within 600 kms. I know my tv's I've seen my tv's and I've set up the tv's we sell. So don;t give me your plasma propaganda. If you dont believe me LOOK at other continents in the owrld North america is the only continent sellingplasmas like thier going out of style.

JimBrick, though I respect your spunk, I think you are stretching things a bit and going on personal opinion. Having your own opinion is fine. Just don't throw bogus ideas out to prove your point.

In the above quote you implied that each company personally delivers their own brand of TV and personally calibrates it to optimum.

JimBRICK wrote:

oh by the way we also set up our tv's in store to the room lighting, so we have no tv's in the store which are using manufacturers settings. My company spent alot of money having dvd's created to maximize the picture on our sets.

In the above quote taken from this thread:

http://www.polkaudio.com/forums/showthread.php?t=48485

the implications are that your store adjusts their sets to fit the lighting conditions of the display room and not the settings that the company's calibration technicians set-up.

Arguments can get heated and everyone has their own opinions. If you wish to dispute the information you find on the web that is your perogative. You just might want to keep with a single story rather than exagerate on it.

BTW... what is the name of the company you work for? Is it a place I can look up on the web so that I can get a better warm fuzzy of their knowledgebase?

Ferres

A good test to separate plasma and lcd is a bright orange color. You will always find the most vivid orange with a plasma screen.

I don't know if the current crop of plasmas have improved their black levels, a weakness in the past.

cheddar

Lush,

I saw stuff at CES too. No reason to say you necessarily know more than other people in this discussion. All I'm saying is that people have to make a decision based on more than your narrow definition of PQ. That includes the fact that there are a lot of 1080p lcds out and only a few very expensive 1080p plasmas.

Sure, if the OP really doesn't watch movies or game on a ps3, than maybe 1080p isn't so important. But things move fast in this industry and 1080p sources might be a lot more common in just a year. No matter what large size panel you buy, that's a lot of green for just one or two years of optimal use.

And the single most important factor I've seen as far as PQ goes is how good the internal scaler/deinterlacer is when converting the signal between resolutions. Sure, at native resolution, all panels look really good. But when you have to invoke the cheap internal scaler/deinterlacer chips included in most HDTVs today, they start to look really bad in comparison to native sets receiving native resolutions. As an example, I recently bypassed all the internal scaler/processing chips in my HDTV and couldn't believe how improved the picture quality was using a 1080p source connected directly to the 1080p lcd display. What the internal scalers/processors did to the pristine blu-ray source was a crime. And that's on the exact same display, just disabling the on board scaler/video processing chips.

TN_Polk_Lover

A good friend of mine recently bought a Sharp 42" Aquos LCD. I went to his house and saw it at lunch one day. He has Comcast digital cable and it was running at 1080. I'm not sure if it was 1080p or 1080i. Anyway he put it on one of the HD channels, I think it was Discovery and they were doing a show on roller coasters where the camera was mounted on the front of the first car. The picture was so good and sharp and lifelike that it was breathtaking to me. I had to make myself get up and leave, I was mesmerized by it.

The only thing negative that he has said, is that on some channels, with regular def. TV that it looks really crappy. I don't know if that is because you get used to how good the High def stuff like that you don't want to go back.

Robert

JimBRICK

LuSh wrote:

I've been arguing with a teenager...I've already mentioned I owned an LCD...I've made my points; its clear to most on this forum that I know what I'm talking about and you don't. Have a nice day.

What a joke you are. you coem on here spouting arguments from 2 years ago that have nothing to do with the current models on the market. next thing your going to tell me is that plasma is going to be better than the new led models coming out

JimBRICK

lcd rules

janmike

JimBRICK, where do you work for The Brick? Just curious.

JimBRICK

Soo ontario

cheddar

LuSh wrote:

I recommend you both pick up a copy of Digital Video Essentials to learn the basic's of visual optic's, NTSC standards used within the industry. It takes alot of guessing out of video, something I wish was used in Audio.

You know, the irony of this statement just hit me. In audio, the holy grail are a series of components from source to decoders to interconnects to speakers that color the sound as little as possible. I know that this is for all practical purposes an impossibility as all links in the chain add their own unique "colorations" to the final presentation. But it's the holy grail nonetheless as we ideally want "just the facts" -- what was there in the original master and nothing more, nothing less.

Yet in video we have a large tolerance for a chipset that does exactly that, adds huge amounts of "coloration" to the original source signal to tweak it and make it display properly in the panel's native display parameters. ISF calibration is needed in part because all this tweaking has so colored the native signal that it now needs a second level of digital tweaking to get it closer to what was originally there in the first place. As an example, why do we need sharpness and edge enhancement? A 1080p signal contains precisely the information we need to display every pixel in its proper position on the panel. Sharpness controls move those pixels from their ideal spots and we have to tweak this control to move the pixels back to something that doesn't introduce artifacts in the original picture, often softening the picture noticeably.

That's the funny irony in what you said. You wish that we would intentionally introduce a huge array of digital colorations in the audio signal path that would then need to be recalibrated to minimize the damage to the original signal. LOL, no way. I'm perfectly happy with as little digital back and forth as possible in my audio signal. The original audio source needs to be faithfully transmitted, not enhanced beyond recognition and messaged back again...:rolleyes:

dragon1952

So which is better ....plasma or lcd

cheddar

Oh yeah, the topic.

I think that 1080p will increasingly drive content. Even if broadcasters only transmit shows now in 720p or 1080i, they'll probably shoot them in 1080p with an eye towards HD disks and such at some point in the material's life cycle.

So you can get a 768p plasma (itself an oddball resolution that isn't even 720p), but just realize that you'll probably want to replace it within a year or so. For myself, I'd either lay out the extra cash for a 1080p plasma or save money and go with the LCD. Since you won't have a plasma with test patterns on it sitting next to your LCD, you'll never notice the differences for the most part, and you're somewhat future proofed for broadcast and HD movies in the future.

LuSh

Cheddar,

You're logic goes against everything known in the industry it really does boggle one's mind. You're overall general lack of knowledge on the subject matter is increasingly transparent. All of North America has used the NTSC standards and ISF calibrations. ISF is the holy grail of video calibration. You're twisting what I'm saying into something it is not. Anybody who has any knowledge of video on this forum will know what I'm talking about and how it benefits the end consumer (you).

In video like audio there have been standards set to ensure accurate reproductoin of medium has been met. These standards allow us to judge and ensure we see exactly what is in the video signal and not extras. Much as in Audio one would try and achieve flat frequency response. These are standards and you're no longer arguing with me but instead an entire industry. These video standards are practised by every manufacture. You're only offering opinon while I have offered concrete facts.

ps....somebody tell Cheddar that the 768p panels are in fact 720p's and that the extra 48 lines are actually never implemented for video use...I think somebody forgot to give him the memo.

JimBRICK

LuSh wrote:

Cheddar,

You're logic goes against everything known in the industry it really does boggle one's mind. You're overall general lack of knowledge on the subject matter is increasingly transparent. All of North America has used the NTSC standards and ISF calibrations. ISF is the holy grail of video calibration. You're twisting what I'm saying into something it is not. Anybody who has any knowledge of video on this forum will know what I'm talking about and how it benefits the end consumer (you).

In video like audio there have been standards set to ensure accurate reproductoin of medium has been met. These standards allow us to judge and ensure we see exactly what is in the video signal and not extras. Much as in Audio one would try and achieve flat frequency response. These are standards and you're no longer arguing with me but instead an entire industry. These video standards are practised by every manufacture. You're only offering opinon while I have offered concrete facts.

ps....somebody tell Cheddar that the 768p panels are in fact 720p's and that the extra 48 lines are actually never implemented for video use...I think somebody forgot to give him the memo.

the only people I hear talking about ISF calibration are the people making money off it. 350 bucks to "calibrate" my tv and the 15 sites I read the guys say the same thing.

"Hi Andy,

Hope someone will come along soon and say they liked it!

In the meantime..

ISF calibration is designed to make a display more accurate in its reproduction of moving images. There are standards set down for how monitors should behave and the SMPTE made recommendations about how they should be used as well. The idea is to get the display to behave more in the manner of the monitor being used in the tele-cine bay when the film was transferred to video. To do this the front panel controls need to be set accurately to start. This is where AVIA or VE come in to play. I also use these discs to adjust overscan and geometry to be correct wherever possible as well.

After this is done greyscale analysis is carried out to see how far from the standard of D65 the unit deviates. Then service menu or user controls are adjusted to make the unit track accurately and front panel controls are re-checked. During the process other facets of the display devices characteristics are checked and adjusted to be more accurate where possible.

I’ve seen many clients units now. Some have been improved quite considerably by calibration others just a little. I have had customers who have owned AVIA and VE but have still been unable to set front panel controls accurately due to misunderstandings on the way devices interact with each other. It’s a kin to having a set of spanners and a Haynes workshop manual and thinking, I am a mechanic. Indeed you can get your engine and suspension working relatively efficiently but without specialist tools and training you won’t want to go racing…..

I do not guarantee everyone will like the image after I am finished but I do guarantee the device will be measurably more accurate in its representation of the original content.


Gordon
"

that was a quote by the one doing the calibration.

He cant guarantee I will like what it looks like. Sounds like a sack of crap to me.
As for the industry talking about it your the first person I've heard bring that up, and I'm a member of 5 different home theater forums.

JimBRICK

and for you HUGE knowledge or television. HD broadcasts are transmitted through an atsc format

cheddar

LuSh wrote:

Cheddar,

You're logic goes against everything known in the industry it really does boggle one's mind. You're overall general lack of knowledge on the subject matter is increasingly transparent. All of North America has used the NTSC standards and ISF calibrations. ISF is the holy grail of video calibration. You're twisting what I'm saying into something it is not. Anybody who has any knowledge of video on this forum will know what I'm talking about and how it benefits the end consumer (you).

In video like audio there have been standards set to ensure accurate reproductoin of medium has been met. These standards allow us to judge and ensure we see exactly what is in the video signal and not extras. Much as in Audio one would try and achieve flat frequency response. These are standards and you're no longer arguing with me but instead an entire industry. These video standards are practised by every manufacture. You're only offering opinon while I have offered concrete facts.

ps....somebody tell Cheddar that the 768p panels are in fact 720p's and that the extra 48 lines are actually never implemented for video use...I think somebody forgot to give him the memo.

Lush,

Have a beer and calm down...

Nobody is arguing against ISF as an actual standard. I'm only saying it's sorely needed on HDTVs because the internal electronics have so screwed up the panel's display properties that the panels come out of the factory with poor display characteristics. What I said mostly referred to the internal electronics of HDTVs NOT, I REPEAT NOT, ISF calibration standards. Don't get all defensive and go hiding behind your NTSC figleaf while completely ignoring my comment about the internal electronics of HDTVs.

So how about 1024x768 plasmas? Are we still talking about 720p? How about 1024x1024 plasmas? The oddball pixel parade for plasmas is pretty 'standard' for that technology. Unlike LCD displays that are pretty uniform in 720p or 1080p pixel count.

Again Lush, breathe, calm down, let's return to a rational discussion...;)

LuSh

Yah Jim,

It's a sack of crap...how's those extended warranty's treating you that you sell?

JimBRICK

http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6463_7-5085739-2.html?nav


here I just saved everyone 250 bucks

cheddar

LuSh wrote:

Yah Jim,

It's a sack of crap...how's those extended warranty's treating you that you sell?

Still in attack mode Lush? Must come from all those little memos you have to write things down on...:rolleyes:...

janmike

One hell of a discussion. I am still not sure which one I will purchase but I think the 1080p is driving things forward. As for picture quality, at 12 feet away I am not sure my eyes would know the difference. Going into a store and standing 4 feet away is not a true test, at least for me. I sure do not watch TV that close, nor do I want to. I have a lot of people here in YK talking up the Sony LCD. Perhaps I will wait for another business trip to view more models. The quest continues.

One thing is for sure, there is no real qualifying evidence here so far that is making me lean toward Plasma or LCD.

dragon1952

janmike wrote:

One thing is for sure, there is no real qualifying evidence here so far that is making me lean toward Plasma or LCD.

Amen brother :rolleyes: Although it appears that there really is no answer....it looks like it's a matter of preferences and trade offs. I may just decide to keep my 35" Mitsubishi tube set for awhile longer.

doug lang

Like i said many threads ago my 58 panny looks mighty fine. It indeed is a matter of preference.

cheddar

janmike wrote:

One thing is for sure, there is no real qualifying evidence here so far that is making me lean toward Plasma or LCD.

That's as it should be. The single best guage for which one you should get is eyes on the product in the viewing conditions most likely in your home with the source material you are most likely to watch. Although it's very hard to demo something with all those things in place, it's really the only way to know for sure.

A good return policy is your new best friend...;)

Edit: You really do owe it to yourself to at least see a 1080p signal being fed into a calibrated panel that does native 1080p passthrough. Most reviews I've read that say there is no difference at such and such a distance are comparing 1080i (which is always tweaked) to 720p or 1080i to 1080p. Just as in audio, a quality source reaching a quality output device is breathtaking...:D

janmike

Well, I partially disagree, but then again, that is my opinion.

For me, I love sports. Watching a hockey game for example on a plasma and LCD there was a big difference. The plasma ruled. I want to see the 50" Panasonic 1080p that should be out here next month.