LCD TVs

Posted by: Phil Sparks on 15 December 2003

I've been coveting one of those slim LCD TVs for the lounge. We've got a Sony HS10 projector for the big screen experience, so the idea was to have a smaller TV in the corner for newsnight and for the kids to watch without closing the curtains and getting the projector out.

My other idea was to be able to check the emails and do little bits of surfing in the lounge, so an LCD TV with VGA-in for a 2nd pc would seem to be just the ticket.

After a bit of surfing the Philips ones seem to do fairly well in the reviews (17" widescreen is £600 or so, 23" widescreen is £1350 or so). The Sony ones also do well, but crucially have no PC in.

So I wandered into the local Comet at lunchtime for a gander. As luck would have it they had the 23" Philips.

Now I know that Comet is unlikely to be the last word demo facilities, but I thought that all the LCD TVs were absolutely dreadful. Much much worse than even the £60 portable CRTs. The colours were dire, they all seemed to shimmer constantly as if the electronics couln't make up their mind quite what to display where, and all of them smudged and smeared as soon as the TV camera moved or someone moved across the screen.

Now, from what I've read there will be pros and cons with these TVs compared to CRT, but I was amazed just how bad the pictures were. Comet were charging £1800 for the Philips - in comparison to the CRTs I'd have thought it was overpriced at £150!!

Of course Comet had about 50 TVs all hanging off a very crummy looking TV splitter, with skinny aerial cable, so they were hardly doing themselves any favours - but ALL the TVs were off the same signal so were affected equally.

Does anyone have an alternative take on this. I'm prepared to pay well over the price of a CRT for the smaller size and PC connnection, but not if the picture quality is much worse than the CRT equivalent.

cheers
Phil
Posted on: 15 December 2003 by Rasher
quote:
so the idea was to have a smaller TV in the corner for newsnight and for the kids to watch without closing the curtains and getting the projector out.

So wouldn't a usable LCD TV at reasonable price (Richer Sounds have a few from £350) be good enough? Sure you are not getting carried away here?
Posted on: 15 December 2003 by Geoff P
Of course for the same money you could buy a PC, including a LCD screen, with a generous Hard Disk, stick a TV card and a decent sound card in it. Eh voila all you need to not only view TV, but also record video & sound and run Pc applications.

GEOFF
Posted on: 15 December 2003 by Phil Sparks
you're right - maybe blowing £1300 on a telly for ocasional/newnight use is a bit steep, it's just that the £60 CRT option seemed just so so much better than the £1300 "must have" option.

I have the PC option in mind (a Nebula card and DVD with theatretec and powerstrip for the projector) but I really wanted a 'normal' telly for non-pc types to use.

Like I said, I'm just suprised at how poor the LCD tellys looked

Phil
Posted on: 16 December 2003 by JohanR
I just got a Samsung 15" LCD PC monitor with built in TV capabilities (made in England and everything!) from work.

Hooked it up to the TV antenna.

The picture was crap!

Hooked it up to the DVD.

The picture was still crap!

And this compared with a 15 years old 21" Philips that, without doubt, has seen it's best.

My guess is that it's the circuit that interpolates from PAL 525 (or what ever) lines to the 768 lines on the screen that is to blame. But it's just a guess.

JohanR
Posted on: 16 December 2003 by reductionist
Just wait a little while. LCD TV's are going through some massive technological changes. In less than a year they will go from monitors + tuners with crap viewing angle, response speed and brightness (this is why a PC + monitor is not a good idea) to CRT comparable picture quality. This will be because IPS (in plane switching) and VA (vertically aligned) LC modes will appear across the whole LCTV range rather than the monitor derived TN (twisted Nematic) modes. Also the backlight intensities will increase to get the same NITs Front of Screen (FoS) and overdrive and other motion blur reduction techniques will become common place. Also scalers are improving all of the time and the prices are going to start to come down very, very fast next year as the next gen. LCD fabs come online in Korea, Taiwan and Japan.

Bad time to be an early adopter!
Posted on: 16 December 2003 by Geoff P
Analysts report that the prices of LCD's probably won't come down as fast as people expect. The reason given is shortage of supply.

I work in the semiconductor industry and can confirm it is just coming out of the worst recession in its history. During recession the way companies running the fabs, such as those that process LCD's, keep from loosing too much money, is to not to buy the very expensive equipment needed to process much larger screen sizes. Hence they consolidate the manufacturing of existing LCD's to the sizes they can make easily already.
Until they have accquired the next generation equipment to handle the substrates for large screen sizes (above 32") they cannot realistically make them. The equipment is built to order as it costs millions of pounds per system and is on long delivery (typically 9 -12 months) so there is likely to be a shortage of large area LCD's, especially those with fancier technology in them, for quite some time.

Plasma uses entirely different manufacturing techniques which are much more about mechanical construction than chemical processing so itis a different business from LCD.

GEOFF
Posted on: 17 December 2003 by reductionist
Geoff,

The Semis industry is in a bad way but active matrix LCD is turning big profits for the big players: Samsung, LGPhilips and Acer Unipac. Sharp also have a decent business in LCTV. This is driving reinvestment in the big fabs. This is not the same business as IC's!


Check out LG Philips announcement ...
http://www.lgphilips-lcd.com/en/news_event/news.html?tg=view&idx=477&page=1

And this from Samsung ...
"The new panel was produced on Samsung's second 5 th generation line, line 6 ( 1,100 mmx 1,300 mm substrate), which started mass production in September 2003." ... from ...
http://www.samsung.com/PressCenter/PressRelease/PressRelease.asp?seq=20031127_0000026837


Cheers
Posted on: 18 December 2003 by Phil Sparks
Blimey - afraid you've lost me with some of the tech speak there guys. However the concensus seems to be that LCD tellys will get better and cheaper but this may be sooner or may be later.

I did a bit more surfing and found a write up on the smaller Philips 17" widescreen LCD TV. The guy really seemed to know what he was talking about and reckoned he'd got it giving a really great picture, but only from an external digital (freeview) source and then only after a lot of tinkering with the settings. By default the TV was applying a great deal of smoothing to eliminate the snow and interference of regular analogue broadcasts, but this made the whole picture smear.

Ref below if you're interested
Philips TV review

I'm still quite keen to get hold of one, I guess I need to try and see the Philips ones in a decent retailer with a good signal and time to play with the settings.

Phil