YADLPQ (Yet Another DLP Question) (1 Viewer)

[David Yon]

My ten year old Toshiba TW40x81 is cranking along fine (although in dire need of an alignment at 1080i), but I'm getting the upgrade bug.

I have a dark, basement home theater room, 10x16. Seating will likely be 8 feet away. Space/decor is not much of an issue, so no need for the big $$$ on Plasma or LCD. My working assumption is that rear-DLP's are going to best most Plasma or LCD in terms of image quality, yes? At the very least, the quality/price ratio is way better, at the expense of taking up a tiny bit more space. Is that still the general wisdom around here?

Anyone have any concerns about DLP tech being abandoned? Seems like most manufacturers are focusing on LCD these days, even though my impression was that DLP usually gives a better image. My take is that even if DLPs aren't sold in 5 years, a 1080p unit in the 50-60" range will hold up quite well quality/feature wise.

Assuming DLP is what I want, I'm looking at 50-60" DLP units. Best Buy has the 50" Samsung HL-T5087S on sale for only $1300. It claims to be the LED light source model. Seems like an excellent buy to me, any inside info on what I'm missing there?

But given that this TV should last at least another 10 years, I may also consider the 60" models. Seems Circuit City has the 61" Series 7 for $2K. A noticeable jump, but also gives me a large size increase. Rounding up seems like a good idea given I'll be living with this decision for quite a few years.

Jump on this now? Wait for laser-based unit to come out? With laser, I figure I'll have the choice of snarfing up a bargain on the older LED-based model, or spending more $$$ to future-proof.

Any insight appreciated, I've been out of the game for quite a bit.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Seems like plasma has pulled ahead of DLP these days (mainly in terms of dynamic range) though I'm not so sure about LCD vs DLP -- I really don't care for the LCD look myself.

Anyway, I'm currently considering the same 61" Samsung LED model and might go for it w/ the latest price drop at Amazon.com (under $1700 shipped now). Unless you insist on buying it locally (and paying the substantial premium), your best bet is probably Amazon.com right now -- Amazon's pricing seems to fluctuate almost daily though.

_Man_

 

[Patrick Sun]

Do you care about viewing angles? RP-DLP are good if you sit right in front of them, but as you move to the sides for angled viewing, the picture quality suffers in terms of dimness/etc.

Also, if you've looked at the LED-RP-DLP sets, are you satisfied with the brightness, contrast ratio, overall picture quality of them? Also, factor in the cost of a replacement bulb every 3-5 years (depending on how much TV you end up watching on the new set).

(Full disclosure, I'm a 50" Panasonic plasma owner, upgraded from a 56" Panasonic HDTV CRT RPTV, and enjoy the wider viewing angles from the plasma over the CRT.)

 

[SethH]

That particular model at Best Buy is last year's model. Don't know if that matters to you or not. In the newer model line-up I don't believe they offer LED until you get to 56".

 

[David Yon]

Haven't seen the LED units in person, but have looked at bulb/color-wheel units in the past. They have always seemed to have a very bright, crisp picture. Reports I've seen on the LED units is that they are generally better regarded than the earlier tech. Is that more controversial than I think?

 

[David Yon]

Yeah, that looks pretty good. Although I'm still wrestling with whether this is really a sweet spot for timing. Black Friday or model year turnover is often a better bet. But then again, for less than my 40" RPCRT....

 

[Patrick Sun]

Oops, forget what I said about bulbs and LED, no such thing for the LED models, but again, at least make sure the LED models "look" good to your eyes.

Once you go with flatscreen technology, it's tough to go back to a RP model, even with the larger viewing area.

 

[David Yon]

Just got back from a quick perusing at Circuit City. Gotta say that I was underwhelmed by the Samsung DLP's, and left more impressed by Plasma's image quality and relative affordability.

The 61" DLP had tremendous problems with viewing angle, even in the sweet spot. At no angle was the screen uniformly bright. Straight-on, all four corners were obviously dimmer, and the bright/dark areas just moved around as you changed positions. Clearly they were attempting too large a screen for the projector.

The 50" was much better, but the sweet spot is not very big before the image became uneven. There was also LCD-like artifacting going on during motion.

LCD's were noticably brighter than Plasma (not a concern for me), but they still don't have the response times of the panels fast enough yet. Motion artifacts were very obvious, as well as what appeared to be scaling artifacts (which weren't as obvious on the Plasmas for some reason). Viewing angle seems to be a solved problem on LCD.

The Plasmas were gorgeous, gotta say. And if you don't care about 1080p, surprisingly affordable. The 50" 720p units were reliably at the $1500 price point. 1080p has a stiff $600-700 premium, which at 8 feet you'd really have to be splitting hairs to notice an improvement. I doubt I'd be able to pick them out double-blind. The image quality difference is more likely to come from whether the TV is having to rescale the image rather than the final resolution.

So now I'm leaning Plasma, which is a whole new set of compromises. A 50" 720p is comfortably in my $$$$ threshold of pain. Going up to 1080p gives me pause pricewise, although I'm concerned about future-proofing, even though the image quality is probably a non-issue. Going much larger is really painful, I'd do better to wait if I want >50", but after seeing the 50-60" range, I'd have to say that the current space likely isn't amenable to a 60" unit.

I don't have much of a brand affinity, with the slight advantage to Panasonic given I have a Viera-compatible DVD player. Any thoughts on that? Worth sticking with the Panny? Or is there an obviously better choice out there...

 

[Craig]

I've been a big fan of rear projection tvs, had a Toshiba TW56X81 that I got in late 1999 and now have a Samsung 56" 1080P DLP (regular model, not LED). I also have a 50" 720P Panasonic plasma in the family room. Overall, I'd go with a plasma. I think the picture is smoother on a plasma, and more uniform across the screen. If you're going to be at 8', a 1080P plasma might be the way to go. While a lot of 720P 50" plasmas go for around $1500, you can find them on sale for around $1200, or less, fairly often. I'd wait until the Memorial Day sales start and check the prices on both the 720P and 1080P models then.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Hmmm... I didn't realize viewing angle (and general unevenness) would be so bad for the new 61" Samsung DLP -- I seem to recall they were just fine a year or two ago when I browsed casually and hadn't heard that it was that bad. I still need to go have a look-see for myself to be sure. I tried J&R just the other day, but they didn't have the new one out on display, and the old one (from last year) was dead.

The newer Panny plasmas do look more and more attractive to me even on paper, especially since pricing for the 50" models seem competitive enough vs the 61" Samsung DLP. I just noticed that Amazon carries the 50PZ85 for ~$150 more than the 61" Samsung right now -- not bad at ~$1850 shipped. And according to the description at Amazon, Panny claims 100K(!) hours lifespan (vs Samsung's 20K hours for their LED light engine), so IMHO that in itself could probably justify the price diff if you plan to put a lot of regular hours on the set, if the claim is true. I figure 20K hours (on the Samsung LED) would probably last ~7 years (assuming 8 hours/day), which is fine enough if true. But the Panny would basically last as long as the rest of the set can hold up -- and presumably, even if you eventually upgrade to something better for your HT, the plasma will still likely be better (and more useable) elsewhere in the house, etc. than the DLP.

But yeah, too bad the plasmas beyond 50" are still far more expensive though. I really do want something closer to 60" myself, but if viewing angle and general evenness of brightness are that bad, then there's not much point to it.

Hmmm... Maybe a 50" 720p as a sort of stopgap wouldn't be such a bad idea, if a 61" DLP won't satisfy. OTOH, maybe I should just wait some more and see how far the larger 1080p plasmas will fall in pricing (and also see what's up w/ Mits' upcoming laser sets)...

_Man_

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Well, seems like most programming will either be 1080i/p or 480i/p. And I would think scaling good quality 480i/p source to 1080p should yield a smoother picture than scaling to 720p, assuming a good scaler is used, but yeah, a lot of things can go "wrong" there, so can't really assuming anything.

_Man_

 

[David Yon]

I was pretty surprised myself. I also didn't get the impression that viewing angle was such an issue even a few years ago. And at the time I had explicitly looked at viewing angle on RP DLP's. Up/down wasn't great, but side-side was more than adequate back then.

But the 61" Sammy on display was pretty marginal---it was the first problem I noticed---and it only took two minutes to drop to the bottom of my list it was so bad.

 

[David Yon]

As stated above, the scalers on the units I saw were certainly doing a very competent job at scaling between 720 and 1080. Can't say that I have a lot of mileage on comparing scalers though.

Accepting that this could change over time, I thought there was still a lot of 720p out there, at least in broadcast? Agreed that HD media content will probably be 1080 from the get-go. At 8-9 feet, with either 50" or 58", it's not clear how much I'd notice the rescale to 720 assuming a good scaler.

Thanks everyone, for the thoughtful discussion by the way, it's helping quite a bit with my reaquaintence of the market.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

David,

I don't see the old(?) 58" 720p Panny being quite the same price as the newer 50" 1080p Panny's. The cheapest I'm seeing right now at a reputable dealer for the 58" 720p is ~$2050 (at B&H). The cheapest for the newer 50" 1080p is ~$1700 (also at B&H) -- and for the older 50" 1080p is ~$1600 (again at B&H).

_Man_

 

[David Yon]

Fair enough, I wasn't comparing apples to apples (retail on the 50" 1080p vs mail order on the 58" 10-series). While I'm nowhere near decided on all of this, I would still seriously consider trading off 1080p for 58", even with the nominal price spread.

Based on the THX recommendations I've seen out there, 58" at 9' is in the "grey zone" on where 1080p starts to become an advantage. So 1080p may have an edge there. But 50" at 9' is exactly on the "full benefit of 720p is visible" threshold without encroaching at all into the "1080p starts to become noticeable". So while its entirely possible that I would give up image quality on some source material at 58", it gets much less likely at 50".

The calculus isn't simple, granted. But based on the THX assessments, it seems like if I'm going to get a 50" set, it may as well be 720p. Obviously if money were no object, 1080p would be the right thing at 58". And in fact one option is to just wait it out until 1080p at 58" is the same price as 720p.

TV's stopped being a simple purchase, what, 15 years ago?

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Hmmm... Yeah, this TV shopping is getting tough.

For me, part of the problem is I'm having a hard time locating any local stores that display the new Samsung DLP. I found a local Best Buy that displayed last year's model of the same, and yeah, it did seem rather underwhelming, but then again, the bad (flood) lighting situation right next to that demo unit certainly didn't help matters. I couldn't tell how much of the performance problem came from the bad lighting and how much was actually the TV itself. Seems like all the stores are basically phasing out DLP sales and could care less about making them look good on display, that is, if they stocked them at all. That local Best Buy did actually have the 73" Mits DLP on display in a prime location (right in front of the prime sales rep area/center), but they seemed to have left it running on a dying bulb, which makes me wonder more whether they're making the DLPs look bad on purpose.

Anyway, I do also wonder if part of the viewing angle problem isn't coming from the LED tech itself. A couple other non-LED DLPs (other than the giant Mits w/ dying bulb) in that store looked much closer to what I was expecting, including the 61" bulb-based Samsung from last year. But I really don't want to go w/ a bulb-based unit now. Besides the various apparent downsides to bulb-based DLPs, I do also wonder if their design w/ the color wheel isn't significantly more prone to breaking down too. My in-laws bought a Samsung unit ~4 years ago, and now, it literally sounds like the color wheel might die soon -- it seems to make some rather loud rattling noise for several minutes after power-on.

Anyway, if the 61" Samsung is a no go, maybe I'll wait and see how the upcoming Mits laser-based displays pan out along w/ pricing on the 58" 1080p plasmas -- currently, the cheapest one seems to be the Samsung 58A550, but even that's ~$1K higher than their 61" LED DLP. I really don't want to go down to 50" although the price would fit the bill ok.

_Man_

 

[David Yon]

Yes, I for one have definitely had to rethink my strategy. I have a feeling that DLP RP is going to die off, if for no other reason than it will likely lose its price advantage over time, and most folks are going be drawn to the sexier flat panels. I have have the same hunch as you about retailer---they definitely are putting DLP in the back seat.

The LED vs bulb thing is a puzzler. The LED units I saw not only had the angle and evenness problems, but I also think they lacked the "pop" that I remember from the older units. Makes you wonder whether they aren't able to get the same amount of light out of LEDs, and even if so, if they are having to really focus the beams to get that brightness (think LED flashlight vs incandescent flashlight). Would possibly explain the viewing angle problem.

I have a feeling I'm going to be waiting to see what happens in 6-12 months. Haven't gotten myself to justify >$3K for a 1080p 58" unit, but the cheaper options are definitely compromises one way or the other.

 

[ManW_TheUncool]

Hmmm... Looks like the Mits laser sets will be a no-go for me since it sounds like they're going to price them even beyond the 58" 1080p plasmas when they finally arrive later this year. And as it is, I don't think I can really justify spending the ~$2.5K on a 58" plasma, assuming the Samsung unit will hit that mark by holiday season.

Guess I'll need to look more into the Samsung 61" DLP again. I'm thinking maybe the viewing angle issue won't matter at all if I just rearrange my livingroom accordingly w/ the help of the bit of space savings going from CRT RPTV to DLP RPTV. It just might work out better that way anyhow...

_Man_

 

[David Yon]

Definitely be sure to see it in person. My experience was that was no viewing angle which gave an evenly bright image. The 50" fared much better in that regard. But based on the unit I saw, I wouldn't remotely consider the 61".

 

[Patrick Sun]

Seeing is believing.