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Author Topic: LCD-Based Rear-Projection TVs David Stambaugh Film God Posts: 4021 From: Eugene, Oregon Registered: Jan 2002 posted 12-06-2002 08:42 PM                        Anyone here taken a close look at any of the new LCD-technology rear-projection TVs, like the Sony KF-50XBR800 ? Cheaper than plasma, supposedly no issues with image burn, and no convergence problems. Curious if anyone has taken a critical look at something like this. So far I can't find any dealers in Eugene that have one on display. The only thing that bugs me about this Sony is it looks like it converts everything to 720p, even 480p DVD. Might be some artifact issues with that. Street price looks to be ~$3500.  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 12-07-2002 02:03 PM                     That Sony monitor looks pretty cool, but I would have to see one in person to be able to make any judgment on picture quality. The image burn thing is an issue with some widescreen TVs and it is nice to see products finally coming out that address the issue. Many with widescreen TVs have to watch 4:3 ratio broadcasts either stretched out across the set or zoomed in to avoid the black/grey bars burning in on the sides of their monitor. With this set I suppose it will not hurt anything to watch all programs in their proper aspect ratio. Still, I don't think I would buy the product. The pixel count (1366 X 768) is better than most any plasma screen, but it still is not good enough. I don't know why the big screen makers cannot seem to get any flat screen TVs made with true 1920 X 1080 pixel resolution. That is what they need to do to properly resolve true 1080i HD. To compare, look at the high end computer monitor market. Apple's Studio Cinema Display 23" widescreen computer monitor has a 1920 X 1200 pixel UXGA-W display. http://www.apple.com/displays/acd23/ Viewsonic has a 22.2" flat screen monitor boasting a whopping 9.2 million pixels! The QUXGA format is 3840 X 2400 native pixels. http://www.viewsonic.com/products/lcd_vp2290b.htm The big screen TV makers need to kick things into another gear and get their pixel counts up. Viewsonic's VP2290 desktop monitor packs enough pixels to nearly fit a full 4,000 line CGI rendering. That's far, far above anything any standard HD set can do. The least thing the flat screen TV makers can do is hit that native 1920 X 1080 pixels mark.  |  IP: Logged John Pytlak Film God Posts: 9987 From: Rochester, NY 14650-1922 Registered: Jan 2000 posted 12-07-2002 02:32 PM                        1280 x 1024 pixels just doesn't sound that impressive anymore, does it?  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 12-07-2002 03:04 PM                     I agree totally with John on his statement. The best rear screen set going right now is the Mitsubishi DLP job. Simply amazing to say the least! Now if we could get Kodak to put their hi rez ILA system into a rear screen set we'd have the ultimate! For every day use I still prefer a CRT set even with its tendency to drift in adjustment slightly over time. Apparent higher resolution, and no artifacts.....unless the sets D to A's are adding anything in. I'd bet that the CRT's would last through a half dozen lamp changes in an LCD rear screen(anywhere from 1800.00 to 3,000.00 worth of lamps!). Average cost to re-crt a set is about 1200.00 to 1800.00. Also, Joe's TV can come and fix it in your home.....but can they, and are many shops familiar enough to repair an LCD set in your home? Moving a big screen, even its guts into the shop is a chore in itself. Mark  |  IP: Logged Paul Mayer Oh get out of it Melvin, before it pulls you under! Posts: 3836 From: Albuquerque, NM Registered: Feb 2000 posted 12-07-2002 03:13 PM                        Also, LCDs still don't make blacks black enough, not for me anyway. CRTs still reign supreme in that area.  |  IP: Logged Ian Price Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1714 From: Denver, CO Registered: Jun 99 posted 12-07-2002 03:17 PM                     Mitsubishi WD-65100 65" HD DLP Rear Projection Television also has 1280 x 768 rsolution. I'll bet the DLP looks better than the LCD though. I want a 50" flat screen for less than $2,000 that is HDTV native. $7,795.00  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 12-07-2002 05:09 PM                     Paul, Many CRT based TV's have a DC restoration circuit in them to aid in proper black level. Even my old 1946 RCA 621TS has it. Ya ought to see the pix on that set!! Sharp as a tack and video bandwidth flat out to 5 mhz! Pictures are sharp as a tack. Still in any TV there is no true "black" Actual black level is 7.5 units IRE or thereabouts with 100 units being full modulation, or max white level. Mark  |  IP: Logged Paul Mayer Oh get out of it Melvin, before it pulls you under! Posts: 3836 From: Albuquerque, NM Registered: Feb 2000 posted 12-08-2002 01:47 AM                        While it's true that black level in US NTSC is 7.5 IRE above blanking, I was talking about the ability to adjust a CRT's screen levels so that there is no discernible light output (beam just barely cutoff) when 7.5 IRE is displayed, especially in a dark room like a theatre, or the video shading area in a production truck. Current LCDs just can't get opaque enough to do that; DLP and I-DLA are better, and like Mark indicates, CRTs rule in that area! BTW, the use of setup (differentiating picture black level from blanking level) is not universal in NTSC countries. Japan for instance, does not use setup--picture black occurs at blanking or 0 IRE. Gives them a few more IRE dynamic range to play with and creates a small pain in the butt for me since I have to reset my monitor's black level every time I want to watch a Japanese Region 2 DVD. Such is the life of a video elitist!  |  IP: Logged Bruce McGee Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1776 From: Asheville, NC USA... Nowhere in Particular. Registered: Aug 1999 posted 12-08-2002 07:53 AM                     What is the key light-source on these LCD projection sets? I used to use a nice xenon LCD projector for computer graphics until last year. It used to go through xenon lamps like nothing. What will owners do when the LCD panels become defective? Example: color spots in the image, etc. Our xenon had a convergence problem that the builder could never get straight. Close, but not perfect. My 1960 21" RCA color TV (chassis CTC-10E) has excellent DC restoration, and after I replaced all the caps, it no longer blooms on white images either!!!  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 12-08-2002 09:32 AM                     Usually LCD sets use either Metal Halide lamps and many come with an integral reflector which is prefocus and adjusted. Some use xenon lamps and these are more expensive. Mark  |  IP: Logged Steve Scott Phenomenal Film Handler Posts: 1300 From: Minneapolis, MN Registered: Sep 2000 posted 12-08-2002 08:33 PM                     Panasonic's 42" LCD projection monitor is no match for DLP, the sheer brightness of the DLP monitor, especially in wide open rooms is far ahead of LCD. The LCD projection TV also has issues with switching between 480p and 1080i modes. Once you set it to one, you basically have to initialize the monitor to change that setting.  |  IP: Logged Bobby Henderson "Ask me about Trajan." Posts: 10973 From: Lawton, OK, USA Registered: Apr 2001 posted 12-08-2002 11:08 PM                     But with DLP maxing out at 1280 X 1024, why bother? It doesn't meet the requirements to show a ful 1080i image. I'm sure Texas Instruments has to be encountering some frustrating R&D problems with their micromirror technology. If not, they surely would have come up with significantly higher rez chips and with the higher rez being in native 16:9 form.  |  IP: Logged David Stambaugh Film God Posts: 4021 From: Eugene, Oregon Registered: Jan 2002 posted 12-20-2002 09:23 PM                        Panasonic LCD Rear-Projection TVs I saw the 40" version of the Panasonic yesterday at Circuit City. They had a high-def video feed running on all the sets on display, which made it easy to compare this one to conventional CRT-based sets, but it only showed video-sourced material, no film, and of course no standard-definition material. From a normal viewing distance, the HDTV video was pretty impressive. I could easily pick out detail in the LCD's picture that was missing on other sets. Color accuracy seemed good; very bright, absolutely no "ringing", ghosting, convergance problems, or other anomalies associated with CRTs. No noticeable geometry errors. It also had less overscan on all sides than the other sets next to it. On the downside, it seemed like fast motion was a little blurred, as if the set's video processor was having trouble keeping up. This wasn't horrible, but I did notice it. Blacks were not completely black (as expected), but were pretty good. I wanted to dink with the picture controls to see if I could improve the blacks at all, but the remote wouldn't work. As with all r-p sets, if you get too close to the screen, you get hot-spotting, but at a reasonable viewing distance, the screen illumination seemed uniform, and image quality was extremely sharp across the entire screen. I also tried to compare the LCD set to plasma, but the plasma sets were on the opposite side of the showroom. But it seemed like the LCD set was sharper and brighter than plasma. Anyway, my 5 minutes spent looking at this set convinced me that this would be worth taking a closer look at...  |  IP: Logged Mark Gulbrandsen Resident Trollmaster Posts: 16657 From: Music City Registered: Jun 99 posted 12-21-2002 06:56 AM                     Dave, LCD's always have that time lag to some extent. They have gotten better, but there will always be some of it. Its an artifact of the LCD panels themselves, not the circuitry. Old LCD's were REALLY bad at this! If you watch alot of sports then LCD is definately not the way to go. Mark  |  IP: Logged David Stambaugh Film God Posts: 4021 From: Eugene, Oregon Registered: Jan 2002 posted 01-06-2003 11:29 AM                        Update: Circuit City has the Sony mentioned in the 1st post in this thread. With high-definition material, it's the best TV I've ever seen. Extremely bright, crisp, clear, yadda yadda. It blew away everything else on their showroom floor. Blacks were surprisingly good. OTOH, with a standard DSS feed of CNN, it looks like total CRAP! The standard DirectTV picture looked like a mosaic. In other words, with a monitor this good, it's definitely garbage in - garbage out. I plan to go back and check it out with DVD material. Anomalies: They were running a high-def signal into it, happened to be a tennis match. Definitely some blurring of fast motion. But relatively static images are unbelievably detailed. Also, it had a pixel stuck on (blue one). Wasn't really visible from a normal viewing distance, but was easy to pick out up close. I would want to find out whether that's considered a defect or not under the warranty. For $4000 there should be ZERO bad pixels.  |  IP: Logged

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