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This never ends. I swear I shall decide by the time hockey season starts.
I've decided on DLP as the weapon of choice, because of cost, quality, and the lack of burn-in issues.
So, the reigning DLP champ on the market is Samsung's 3rd generation sets.
LG has just released theirs, with Panasonic and Toshiba releasing theirs by the end of the summer.
Who's got reviews of these new sets?
Here at the store we have the samsung set. Its nice, but the blacks aren't very black, more of a grey.
I've heard good things about the toshiba ones. We've got a couple on order, but I guess theres a world wide shortage of the special dlp screens, so they've been delayed for a bit.
JVC is coming out with on too, and from the looks of things looks promising.
Saw the LG model on tech tv a while back, they gave it a better rating of the group, I think second place out of the 5 they tested. Can't remember what first place was.
Don't know much on the panasonic one yet. We'll probably order some closer to christmas.
I forgot you worked in an electonics store. Thanks mang. ;)
I didn't know JVC was coming out with one, they make nice stuff.
*takes notes*
The model itself looks stunning. We have pictures here in the store. Don't have a scanner handy though :( . JVC has been a good line for the store, few if any problems or repairs. Same with toshiba, top notch. We've had the odd samsung tv come in for repairs, and get nearly as many rca's returned as we sell.
How do the regular broadcast signals (4:3) look when they're stretched to fill the screen? I heard if you have a cruddy signal coming in the tv shows all the flaws, so unless you have a dish or digital cable it's not worth it.
garbage in, garbage out.
I would recommend looking into dish or digital cable or something, especially if you're looking to pay three to five thousand dollars for a television.
No it doesn't look great, but its not unbearable. Its like getting use to dvd then going back to vhs type thing. Now this is in direct compairison to the 4:3 tvs we have sitting next to it, so in your home, by itself, it may not be so bad. And by the sounds of things, they're slowly pushing to get everything in 16:9. But that goes for ever 16:9 tv, rear projection, lcd, plasma, whatever. I wouldn't let the 16:9 issue sway your purchase.
I'd personally go with DLP over the five or six major formats avaliable right now.
I went to a high-end store here last night, they had the Samsung DLP next to an $8000 high end plasma. When they're next to each other, you can see right away how awful a technology plasma is. Artifacts, pixelation, motion blur... I have no idea why plasma became so popular. I just hope DLP isn't the Betamax of TV technologies, clearly superior but somehow fails.
Plus, I figure it's a safer investment. If something happens to the display on a plasma or LCD out of warranty, the whole unit is toast. DLP's you can just replace the bulb or at worst the color wheel or DMD processor. The screen itself can only be damaged if you hit it.
DLP is getting pushed... big time. DLP2 chips are in testing via Texas Instruments right now, actually.
I'm seriously looking at how Intel's LCOS tv's are going to work out. there was some information coming about one vender bringing them in the US... but I just can't remember who. But the prices were lower than DLP - projected - and the quality was damn nice.
as long as it was a digital feed that is.
What's the difference? Are they just cramming more micro-mirrors on there for a higher resolution?Quote:
Originally posted by gerbick
DLP is getting pushed... big time. DLP2 chips are in testing via Texas Instruments right now, actually.
What is LCOS? Is it a panel display? I'd imagine it suffers from the same issues, burn-in, motion blur, artifacts, etc.
it was Philips... that who it was...
DLP2... I think it's a dual chip design... upscan, et al get better processing, and something else... I think a slightly more enhanced configuration.
400:1?
Bleh.
So DLP2 will probably handle signal conversion better? Sheesh, might as well go for the configuration they use in cinema projectors, 1 chip per color instead of a color wheel.
Toshiba has 1 LCOS TV. Never seen it in action though.
Yea, DLP has nearly no moving parts, so there isn't much that can go wrong. Even the lightbulb is covered under factory warranty.
Let me get this straight. The projection tvs, they're normally less quality, and you can't view them from as wide an angle, right?
Mostly correct. Different sets will have wider viewing angles. Projection TV's, including DLP's, do have a limited vertical viewing angle though. If you stand up, you'll notice a severe difference in the image. However in terms of image-quality, DLP beats panel displays hands down. Panels are fine for your PC, but really aren't suited well to moving images.
Its depends what you mean by higher quality. The quality loss comes from the screen size, not the unit itself. If you took a 60" CRT television (which would weight about 3 tons) and watched regular cable, it wouldn't look very good.
As for the viewing angle, its not bad at all. You just can't see it from angles which you wouldn't be watching in normal situations anyways. I try to explain this to people in the store. They'll stand right next to the tv, off to the side, and complain about the picture being dark.
Yes, I wouldn't be trying to watch the hockey game sitting at any extreme of my TV anyway.
So I went to anther store last night. (Harvey for those of you in the tri-state area.)
Seems Samsung makes a couple versions of certain sets they only give to certain distributers. They have a thinner bezel, are a couple inches bigger than their 'standard' counterparts, and use some kind of special signal processor to upsample to 720p that the other ones don't.
pooon, whatchu know about this?
They had another German maker there I've never heard of, Lowe? (Probably manufactured by someone else and re-branded.) Their CRT's were nice (but expensive), but their DLP was awful. Pretty case, crappy image. Whatever material they put over the screen tries to make it look like a CRT with poor results, there's a thin green border around the screen and it's a bit fuzzy.
I think my heart is set on the 43" or 46" (with the thinner bezel) Samsung. I saw the LG, it was good, but not quite on par.
In conclusion, I guess it's best off to wait a couple months for the other makers to release theirs, even just to see if it pushes prices down a little. It's clear to me now though that it's the best technology out there. If costs drop and they can make sets between 32-40 inches, there's no reason it can't dominate the market for years to come.
Loewe (low-vey) are friggin' AWESOME.
But expensive as all get out.
Sounds nice. I guess we're not one of the distributers of that model :(
Havn't heard of Lowe. Probably don't deal in Canada.