cute fuzzy bunny
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Couple of tidbits that might be of interest, since we just took the HD plunge.
Most of the tvs in the store are set to the so-called "torch" mode. Brightness turned up, colors over saturated, and with a dvd of 1080i eye candy playing. When you get it home and set it to theater mode or whatever they call the setting with normal brightness, contrast and color, it'll look very different.
Some HD televisions are very poor at displaying SD from signal sources like analog cable tv. Even if you have digital cable, the first 99 channels are analog. Some of those might have digital or HD counterparts though.
As far as I know, absolutely zero stations are producing or broadcasting content in 1080p and due to the bandwidth constraints that might remain the case for many, many years. A great deal of current content is just 720p.
Cable and satellite providers are compressing the signal, reducing the quality, in their lockdown competitive battle to claim the most HD channels. They only have so much pipe, so in order to fit more channels into it, the quality has to be reduced. A recent analysis by a videophile on avsforum.com found that comcast was reducing their PQ by as much as 30-40% on some channels.
Directv is trying to mitigate this by launching more satellites, which makes the required dish larger and much harder to accurately point to pick up the current 5 satellites. Cable is trying to mitigate this by offering up some kind of a switched cable methodology which will render every device currently in use obsolete, including cable tuners, tivos and the current cablecards. While this will take a long time to implement, its possible that your current cablecard ready television will need an external box to decode cable tv in 3-5 years. The cable companies REALLY hate the cablecard thing.
Directv's new HD dish is frickin huge. I'm all but certain I could take it off, get on the roof and jump while holding it over my head and sail for at least 2 miles before touching the ground.
Directv's new HD receivers stink. I feel like I'm testing a beta product.
Contrast IS pretty important, but less of an issue these days. Early HD plasma/lcd sets often had 500:1 or 750:1 contrast ratios. The nutshell is that this is the range of difference allowed between the darkest and lightest shades. A set with a 500:1 contrast ratio might be unable to display a true black shade when the brightness is turned up or a true white shade when the brightness is turned down. My first plasma set from a million years ago had a 500:1 ratio and I hated it. If it was a dark movie, you had muddy gray or yellow whites and in a bright movie, gray or purple tones instead of black. Many vendors of cheap sets now use "dynamic contrast" which attempts to adjust the range up and down to match the video content being supplied. Others claim ridiculous 10,000:1 ratios that dont actually happen in real use but makes the stats look better than the 5000:1 on the set next to it in the store, even though it might be an inferior set.
Its hard to beat something like a vizio set for $1000-1100 at Costco for price/performance.
TV's these days dont last as long as TV's used to. I had some 12 year old sets still be going strong while I've had some sets bought in the last 5 years crap out after a couple of years.
HDMI can be a pain in the butt. Besides making for a nice one wire connection between your signal source and the tv, HDMI has copy protection circuitry built into it. At some point, some content may be produced that requires the use of HDMI (vs component) or it wont play on your set, although that day may be 5 years away. In the meanwhile, many sets have tamper proofing built into the set so that you cant break into the signal stream and steal the protected content. My JVC set has (i am not making this up) a sensor inside that detects if you've removed the back of the set which disables the HDMI card and requires that it be replaced by the technician servicing it. Which went off when I moved the set from the old house to the new one, disabling the HDMI port. If you wiggle the cable funny, or your 3 year old does, it also disables the port. Fortunately I found a service menu option that allows you to do a funny series of self-tests, powering the unit on and off, and then pulling the plug in mid power on to force a re-enable of the HDMI port.
As far as the PQ...it looks great especially on eye candy like Discovery HD theater. Other shows look markedly clearer. For ten minutes. Then except for specific scenes you sort of forget its there. But when you flip on an SD show after watching HD for an hour, the SD show looks muddy.
Most of the tvs in the store are set to the so-called "torch" mode. Brightness turned up, colors over saturated, and with a dvd of 1080i eye candy playing. When you get it home and set it to theater mode or whatever they call the setting with normal brightness, contrast and color, it'll look very different.
Some HD televisions are very poor at displaying SD from signal sources like analog cable tv. Even if you have digital cable, the first 99 channels are analog. Some of those might have digital or HD counterparts though.
As far as I know, absolutely zero stations are producing or broadcasting content in 1080p and due to the bandwidth constraints that might remain the case for many, many years. A great deal of current content is just 720p.
Cable and satellite providers are compressing the signal, reducing the quality, in their lockdown competitive battle to claim the most HD channels. They only have so much pipe, so in order to fit more channels into it, the quality has to be reduced. A recent analysis by a videophile on avsforum.com found that comcast was reducing their PQ by as much as 30-40% on some channels.
Directv is trying to mitigate this by launching more satellites, which makes the required dish larger and much harder to accurately point to pick up the current 5 satellites. Cable is trying to mitigate this by offering up some kind of a switched cable methodology which will render every device currently in use obsolete, including cable tuners, tivos and the current cablecards. While this will take a long time to implement, its possible that your current cablecard ready television will need an external box to decode cable tv in 3-5 years. The cable companies REALLY hate the cablecard thing.
Directv's new HD dish is frickin huge. I'm all but certain I could take it off, get on the roof and jump while holding it over my head and sail for at least 2 miles before touching the ground.
Directv's new HD receivers stink. I feel like I'm testing a beta product.
Contrast IS pretty important, but less of an issue these days. Early HD plasma/lcd sets often had 500:1 or 750:1 contrast ratios. The nutshell is that this is the range of difference allowed between the darkest and lightest shades. A set with a 500:1 contrast ratio might be unable to display a true black shade when the brightness is turned up or a true white shade when the brightness is turned down. My first plasma set from a million years ago had a 500:1 ratio and I hated it. If it was a dark movie, you had muddy gray or yellow whites and in a bright movie, gray or purple tones instead of black. Many vendors of cheap sets now use "dynamic contrast" which attempts to adjust the range up and down to match the video content being supplied. Others claim ridiculous 10,000:1 ratios that dont actually happen in real use but makes the stats look better than the 5000:1 on the set next to it in the store, even though it might be an inferior set.
Its hard to beat something like a vizio set for $1000-1100 at Costco for price/performance.
TV's these days dont last as long as TV's used to. I had some 12 year old sets still be going strong while I've had some sets bought in the last 5 years crap out after a couple of years.
HDMI can be a pain in the butt. Besides making for a nice one wire connection between your signal source and the tv, HDMI has copy protection circuitry built into it. At some point, some content may be produced that requires the use of HDMI (vs component) or it wont play on your set, although that day may be 5 years away. In the meanwhile, many sets have tamper proofing built into the set so that you cant break into the signal stream and steal the protected content. My JVC set has (i am not making this up) a sensor inside that detects if you've removed the back of the set which disables the HDMI card and requires that it be replaced by the technician servicing it. Which went off when I moved the set from the old house to the new one, disabling the HDMI port. If you wiggle the cable funny, or your 3 year old does, it also disables the port. Fortunately I found a service menu option that allows you to do a funny series of self-tests, powering the unit on and off, and then pulling the plug in mid power on to force a re-enable of the HDMI port.
As far as the PQ...it looks great especially on eye candy like Discovery HD theater. Other shows look markedly clearer. For ten minutes. Then except for specific scenes you sort of forget its there. But when you flip on an SD show after watching HD for an hour, the SD show looks muddy.
