Emperor's New Clothes?

Bit rate of the broadcast feeds is the likely limiting factor (more is less, less is more when it comes to channels)–and the displays these days don't give an inch to images not properly scaled to the native resolution of the display.

I think that's a bit harsh. I'm not familiar with the Sony you mentioned but I have had a Pioneer and Panasonic plasma for some time now.

To be fair, I've only ever tried them with Sky and not from a signal coming from an aerial, but I'm quite happy with both of them.

The picture isn't as good as a CRT but its pretty close and very very impressive from a DVD5 and HD-DVD player.

The trade off for me wasn't so much about style but size. I've wall-mounted both of mine and the amount of room its saved me is enormous.

I'm pretty shocked that you think it is unwatchable and would recommend that you have a look at some other screens before writing the whole thing off.

2 weeks ago my 4year old 84cm Grundig CRT stopped working and needed to go to repair. I thought I could use the opportunity to migrate to a flat screen and spent several hours in various stores. Decision against LCD was done quickly, I simply find the backlight annoying. So, I was very close to get a Plasma, which of course also requires a new rack...

A week later the Grundig came back after some bad capacitors had been replaced for €80 and I reinstalled it. Since them I watch happily again. Colors are nice and correct, no jagged edges, no judder and the sound is also much better.

The big plasmas are fun, but they really need HDTV to shine, the bigger the more important. But until HD is available, I´ll stick with the CRT.

Differnce is even bigger for computer monitors, all affordable LCDs are suffering from color shifts and/or poor response time. I hope my CRT will live for ever.

brgds..TC

Think in terms of what that screen CAN show you...
It's like having a 252/SC/250 into SL2s


But the source is a sony walkman, all the boxes are on top of each other, and the SL2s are back to back in the middle of the room.

Setup & source are everything - one you can control - albeit if you don't have the experience of setting up a screen it could be a long period of trial and error.

The other is totally beyond your powers.
Eggheads at the Beeb sit in little rooms deciding how much bandwidth they want to give to broadcasts.. and therefore how much quality you COULD get, if your TV's ended up set up correctly.



The right screen, with the right channel and the right setup can be astonishing.

I've always referred to the picture on my dvd of The Italian Job - the REAL version.

If the picture looks lifelike on that then I have to assume that when Cash in the Attic looks dire then it isn't necessarily the fault of my TV set.

Your old B&O never had to deal with upscaling and de-interlacing limited bandwidth digital signals - so it never had these issues to trip over.

the last crt tv i had was a toshiba 32", i had an arcam dv-89 plugged into it via component, and it was of good picture quality, then bought a panny pw6b sd plasma and the dv-89 again fed from component had much better pq than the toshiba ever had, and pq is even better now with the tv-drive and n-vi, have had similar discussions about hd being so much better than sd, the fact is if you don't feel it justifies the price keep what you have.

Not missing my old CRT.

Have 50" panny plasma with Sat Hi Def and DVD5. Wouldn't go back to a bulky CRT for all the tea in China. One thing that bugged me about CRT was the geometric distortions and inconsistencies in the picture. All gone with a fixed pixel truly flat display. I considered a Sony 34 inch widescreen XBR CRT when plasma's were still megabucks. Then I realised that the letterboxed movie would be not much improvement over a 4:3 27" TV (height wise) despite weighing in at 300 lbs! The bickering over screen geometry adjustments and "red patches" and all the other analog related distortions reported on the AVS forum was the last straw. I simply waited a bit longer for plasma HDTV to be sanely priced.

Garbage in Garbage out applies though. Just like a decent speaker the source signal must be good!

Sony Bravia XBR2 32" LCD. Tweak the settings as recommended on Av Forums. I am amazed at how good basic cable looks on it. Food TV is remarkable for its colors. Works well with HD Cable, too. I have not watched a DVD with it, but I know it will look great too. We do not miss our 27" Panasonic CRT "Tau" model in the least. I think there are better TV's out there, higher resolution and better images. But I would rather spend the price differential on an nSub for upstairs.

quote:

Originally posted by David Dever:
Bit rate of the broadcast feeds is the likely limiting factor (more is less, less is more when it comes to channels)–and the displays these days don't give an inch to images not properly scaled to the native resolution of the display.

So true.
At the Superbowl thing, half of the people ended up watching it with an old Sony 32" XBR2 preffering it over the 50" Plasma fed from a standard broardcast signal. ( some ppl. just like a large screen even the signal quality is shite )
It was odd there was a signal delay between two sets.

Needless to say, I've watched neither.

I got a 42" Panny plasma (back when Panasonic was the "best") in '01. Of course it is not HD ready or anything but even now almost 6 years down the road it sits there on the wall and does a great job. Progressive from a decent DVD player (ahem..Denon) is cinematic and it ain't too shabby in what it does in composite off TV/cable.

One thing it has going for it I think, is not too many pixels and resolutions to scale. I don't see anywhere near the amount of motion blur that the higher pixel count HD plasma's display. In spite of claims to the contrary I don't think LCD has that problem cracked yet and is worse than plasma for blur.

I am sure a 'true' full HD quality picture on an optimised HD screen can be mind blowing (looks that way at demos) BUT where I am they are still in the stone age for TV and the bandwidth vs channels battle is bound to be lost by the time HD really get's going.

regards
Geoff

Jono I am with you totally. My Loewe xelos recently went bang with a nice white spark and smoke and I then mused what to do. Spent an age in the shops looking at various flat panels, mainly LCD due to not wanting anything bigger than 26" wide. I rather quickly concluded that the technology has a long way to go. It's not related to bit rate: sure the sky box may push out a lousy picture to start with but the standard CRT does so much more with it...

Now, is it a kind of analogue warmth that the the CRT puts on the picture to mask the imperfections? CRTs are like vinyl.... (LOL)

what is more interesting is that I saw a blue-ray player in currys digital into a 60" plasma and thought much the same of that in comparison to a hidef TV humax box into my DLP projector. The projector was far more cinematic and convincing. The big plasma on blu ray was always drawing attention to its faults.

So a new line oscillator fitted to my TV I am very happy.

Gary

quote:

The picture isn't as good as a CRT but its pretty close

I think that says it all...

I just replaced my nearly 19 year old TV with a just three years old 32". Cost? £80 with delivery by the ex owner. CRT, of course.

With everybody "trading up" to flat screens the market must be filled with nearly new CRT's.

IF I was looking for really a big picture I would get a projector.

JohanR

I agree. If you want a big screen (36"+) you should get a projector.

Why bother with 50" when you can have 100"+...

quote:

I agree. If you want a big screen (36"+) you should get a projector.

Why bother with 50" when you can have 100"+...

Even if you just want to watch some off-air broadcasts?

You may as well drink champagne all the time.

quote:

Originally posted by Melnobone:

quote:

The picture isn't as good as a CRT but its pretty close

I think that says it all...

Err no I don't think it does!! Many people 'claim' CRT is best but they are either not really interested in TV's, are too tight to justify spending say £600-1500 on a flat panel TV, which is fine and their choice, or maybe, and I am hoping this is more the case, just don't fully understand that there are many more aspects that make up a modern video system and it is not just the display! A Naim sistem is more than just it's speakers surely and throwing an expensive set of speakers at a lowly CD player and amp is probably not going to fix it.

Back when 3 channels & a 21" CRT TV was more than enough TV for anyone to handle, it was broadcast with 576i (576 line interlaced – I only talk lines rather than resolution to keep thing simpler) via analogue into a 576i device, so very simple everything matched, loads of bandwidth and no need to convert anything so a well balanced system. Now that was fine for 30-40 years, I don't know how long, but longer than I am old anyway....

Now we are in the 21st century we have a million and one channels/sources being broadcast/fed using a different number of lines 480i, 576i, 576p, 720p, 1080i & 1080p, via HD-DVD, BD, DVD, internet or broadcast digitally with wildly different bandwidths via freeview, sky or sky-hd and display devices that have a varying number of lines (say between 480 lines & 1080 for arguments sake).

There are going to be several factors here that affect PQ. Poor quality original program material (say old US NTSC converted to PAL), low broadcast bandwidth with poor quality digital encoding to squeeze it all in, then because flat TV’s work differently to CRT the video signal has to be processed before being displayed. All the things here detract from the Naim/enthusiast argument that is that source first rules as many things are out of your control!

Take a Sky broadcast, how do you expect it to look good if you get a rubbish PQ US show on UK Gold, convert it from NTSC to PAL, compress it to fit into an unfeasibly low bandwidth signal, then beam it into your home where your Sky box feeds it into your fancy flat TV. Now the TV has to mess around with it with it’s cheap inbuilt video processor as the signal is 576i lines and you TV has 480p, 720p or 768p lines if you have a 'HD Ready’ TV or 1080p if you have a ‘Full HD’ TV to display your rubbish SD picture on! Rubbish original, broadcast it via limited bandwidth, process it to hell (de-interlace and scale + more) to make it work with the high quality display and you are going to see all that crud come straight through and the better quality the display the more you are going to see the crud!

Rubbish source aside, ignore Sky/freeview etc, even with DVD, normal SD DVD, output is 576i by default, hey a CRT did/does that, but now with a plasma/lcd, it works in a progressive/non-interlaced way not interlaced, so the DVD feed has to be deinterlaced, then because no flat panel TV's have 576 lines the signal has to be converted or scaled up or down from 576 to the screens number of lines.

On an SD flat TV, because they were aimed at the mass US and Japanese market most had 480 lines (in tune with NTSC) rather than 576 lines (in tune with PAL) as such the signal has to be DOWN converted/scaled from 576 to 480.

On a HD Ready flat TV the SD feed 576 has to be converted to the HD panels 720, 768, 1024 or 1080 etc lines before it can be displayed.

Funnily enough and believe it or not, if you buy an SD flat TV rather than a ‘HD Ready’ or ‘Full HD’ flat TV to display your SD signal your SD picture would probably look better on the SD TV as your TV's cheap video processor (VP) would have had to do less work! HD for HD, SD for SD, simple, but Currys won’t tell you that!

The quality of the video processor (VP's or some term as scaler) is the key here and has such a big influence on PQ here and many flat TV's have pants VP's and as such the more video processing needed the worse they look. A DVD player that can output progressive (inbuilt deinterlacer) or can upscale (has inbuilt scaler) can make a big difference. Similarly get a TV with a high quality scaler and the picture looks much better than a TV with a low quality scaler. CRT's do not need video processors or scalers as 576i into a 576i device does not need processing. If you want to go the whole hog and have the dogs nads then simply get a quality external scaler, think of it as the equivalent in the audio world as the phono pre-amp that makes your old record deck work with your new high quality stereo system! A quality SD DVD signal fed via a high quality video processor into a HD display will look great and be HD ready for the future.

Right the way forward then, well Freeview and Sky broadcasting at low bandwidth we can do little about, well we can try but I doubt we can do much, but some things look better than others, try some of the newer programming on CH4 & CH5, Lost etc was good. Lost via a Video Processor into a HD TV was fantastic. Sky HD may be turning the tables for broadcast material, but at a cost to you of course and HD-DVD and BD DVD are the future! If you don't ever want or need HD Sky and if you don't want or need HD DVD sources then you probably don’t need a HD display!

On the flip side, take a Sky HD feed from say BBC HD, make sure it's proper HD footage, say Lonely Planet, take it out of the Sky Box at 1080i, feed it into your 1080 panel or projector, if you really want the best then feed it via a high quality scaler and I'd like anyone to argue the picture is worse or at best pretty close to CRT!!!

With the CRT v flat panel argument you are effectively comparing a well balanced old system to a unbalanced (more so with a HD Ready or Full HD display showing an SD feed) new system being fed a rubbish SD feed and with such a high quality display device up front it is going to show up each and every weakness in the link, which is more likely than not going to be a rubbish broadcast source (sky or freeview) and then all the extra processing than needs to go on (sky, freeview & DVD).

Once everything is back in balance, i.e. a HD source into a HD display or you understand where the weaknesses are (bad source + low broadcast bandwidth with sky + freeview or poor video processing with SD sky/freeview & DVD) and address it as best you can (usually an external VP), then just chucking in a flat TV may not bring all the joys you were hoping for.

It’s a fact though that CRT is not best!

But LCD's blur any real motion and displaying deep blacks is a problem and the viewing angles are narrower than flat screen CRT .Plasma's suffer from 'burn' run VERY hot and because the gas forming the plasma can leak or become less reactive to electrical charges, plasma TV systems have a limited shelf life compared to a CRT.

As for surround sound, I've always stayed with a 2 speaker set up as the extra boxes(centre, rears and sub) effect the sound quality massively...

If you want to enjoy a films in spectacular surround sound on a big screen go to the cinema. I watch films in good old stereo.

CRT's burn.. LCD's are slow, but getting faster, although I'm still not a huge fan. Plasmas no longer suffer from burn, especially if looked after well in their first 50-100 hours of life, never buy an ex demo plasma!!

Horses for courses, but PQ wise, Plasmas (especially HD ones) are better than CRT's.

If you want to listen to spectacular music, go to a concert. I love them, but I still like listening to music at home through good kit as well..

Nothing tops live music.

A night at the opera or a sweaty night listening to a rock band in the local pub cannot be beaten.

Live is 1st.

Spare cash for your stereo? Buy some concert tickets instead.

SimonJ, I appreciate the time you took to make your lengthy post, it sums up my view on the current situation too. The question is, at this present moment is there a suitable external video scaler/processor that will convert your common or garden off-air broadcast (be it freeview or whatever) and make it comparable to current CRT viewing on a 1080 flat panel?

The reason I ask is that I'm going to be in the market for a new screen in the next month or so. I've so far been underwhelmed with the quality of off-air broadcasts on modern flat panels and this still forms the majority of my tv viewing. I was toying with the idea of an external processor, but I have no idea where to start with these. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Stuart

quote:

Originally posted by Melnobone:
I watch films in good old stereo.

If you a using a DVD player - try an AV processor and at least fire up the centre channel.

"Good old stereo" is pretty much no good with multichannel soundtracks - downmix drowns dialogue.

quote:

Originally posted by Stubby:
SimonJ, I appreciate the time you took to make your lengthy post, it sums up my view on the current situation too. The question is, at this present moment is there a suitable external video scaler/processor that will convert your common or garden off-air broadcast (be it freeview or whatever) and make it comparable to current CRT viewing on a 1080 flat panel?

The reason I ask is that I'm going to be in the market for a new screen in the next month or so. I've so far been underwhelmed with the quality of off-air broadcasts on modern flat panels and this still forms the majority of my tv viewing. I was toying with the idea of an external processor, but I have no idea where to start with these. Any recommendations would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Stuart

It all depends on budget, what size screen you want, what you watch mostly (film or video source and if fast moving sport etc), your viewing conditions (light etc) and a bag of other things.

I personally use and can recommend the DVDO iScan products, although I know the Lumagen and a few other are good also. I have a VP30 with ABT102 card, but had a HD+ before with my old PWD6 panel

The thing to get absolutely right is to make sure whatever screen you can buy accepts native resolution at both 50hz and 60hz via HDMI and/or an analogue HD input (RGBHV, VGA or Component etc). If you are going for a 720 or 1080 panel then you are more likey than not going to be ok, but if you go for a 768 panel like I have you have to be carefull as some will nto work with processors that well and some that will work better than others. I previously bought a Panasonic HD TV TH42PV500 when it first came out, I very quickly realised that this TV could not be tweaked as well as a Panasonic Panel so bought the commercial TH42PHD8 panel instead, which is the same screen in different clothes!!

If you have some specifics then I'm sure people can advice, else maybe have a scout over on AVForums at the Video Processor section :-

http://www.avforums.com/forums/forumdisplay.php?f=39

I am now eyeing up the VP50 or maybe comparible processor. The VP50 has a very neat trick called PReP that means it can extract an interlaced signal from an non scaled deinterlaced HDMI/DVI signal and then deinterlace it itself with it own fancy posher deinterlacer which should mean less jaggies and combing etc if it deinterlacer is better than the cheap deinterlacer say in the Sky HD box. This VP50 is the ideal device for using with SKY HD as it can deinterlace HD content from 1080i, but its real trick is with SD content from Sky HD box that is fed out via HDMI at 576p (and only) what the VP50 will be is extract the interlaced feed and deinterlace it itself. I also suspect that the VP50 can do the same neat trick with the n-Vi/DVD5's 576p output signal from DVI and extract the interlaced signal, deinterlace it and then upscale it.

quote:

Originally posted by SimonJ:

quote:

Originally posted by Melnobone:

quote:

The picture isn't as good as a CRT but its pretty close

I think that says it all...

Err no I don't think it does!! Many people 'claim' CRT is best but they are either not really interested in TV's, are too tight to justify spending say £600-1500 on a flat panel TV......

It’s a fact though that CRT is not best!

Simon, Thanks for this post.

My viewing room has over £20k of AV equipment in it incluing a DVD5, SIm2 projector and 8 foot screen.

However, the best piece of kit (both in terms of performance and Cost (and it cost £4k in 2000!!))is my B&O Avant CRT TV set (OK my 2nd hand LP12 for £450 might shade it on value!!)

Yeah, I've tested just about all there is but there is something in the colour saturation on the B&O Avant that makes viewing, even terestrial TV, a joy!

Maybe it is an analog thing!! (and me tight!??)

Regards P

No it's an Standard Def High Def thing. View SD into a HD screen and it is likely to look pants unless you have a descent scaler in there somewhere.

View

SD into SD screen versus HD into HD screen

or even

HD into SD screen versus HD into HD screen

and see what you think then.

BTW : Don't do this at Comet, you don't buy your Naim kit from there.

quote:

View

SD into SD screen versus HD into HD screen

or even

HD into SD screen versus HD into HD screen

and see what you think then.

Why did buying a telly get so complicated!