HD equipment for SD feeds (1 Viewer)

[Will Zog]

I'm looking at all thu usual suspects among non-tube wide screens-- Plasma (Panny ED/HD's), LCD (Sony's) and DLP (Sammy's). In the stores, all three look good (42-50" range), and I'm aware of the limitations of each.

My question is what will best handle SD feeds? Most of what our cable co (Charter) provides is SD, and DVD's are mostly weekend diversions. So while I want to go big screen, most of our viewing is SD - what is the best bet to handle both high and low quality video?

Many thanks in advance for everyone's input!

 

[Bob_Bo]

Hey Will,

I've been making the rounds lately to my local B&M's, trying to get a handle on that same quandary.

While much of this is subject to viewer preference, store set-up, etc., what I've found is that most of the fixed pixel displays look lousy when displaying SD. Plasma being the exception (Is that considered fixed pixel?)Pixelization was probably the most notable complaint I had.

The PQ of the plasma sets looked great to me across all inputs, however the cost excluded them from my choices.

LCD units, looked great displaying DVD's, pretty nice with an HD signal, but weak with anything SD (Sony KF-60WE610 was about my favorite).

I felt DLP units were the worst of the bunch, the SD broadcasts were just horrible, HD was better but didn't blow me away and as expected, DVD was good(looked at several different brands).

I think that CRT based RPTV's are still the way to go, for the best PQ across all inputs (I enjoyed the Mits WS-65813).

 

[Bob McElfresh]

All the good HD displays look crappy with standard-definition video. (Remember: it was designed for a black and white 9" tube in 1940 and has not changed much since).

But with respect to Bob, I thought the Samsung DLP units did a better job than most others with SD signals. They have a Farijuda chip that does the de-interlacing and up-conversion and does some other processing so it looks decent.

People with progressive-scan DVD players noticed that the Samsung picture quality actually looked better if they turned off the progressive-scan video and just sent SD video to the Samsung unit. (The Farijuda chip only gets involved with a SD video signal.)

So I'd give the Samsung DLP unit a extra point for this ability.

 

[Will Zog]

Hmm, I guess it's all opinion - I've got one vote for Plasma, one for DLP, and over on AVSforum, I saw one vote for Sony LCD - something about having a converter in it...

Alas, forced to trust my own eyes, I guess!