Slashdot Log In
A Gamer's Guide to Buying an HDTV
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Dec 05, 2006 12:49 PM
from the they're-expensive dept.
from the they're-expensive dept.
The excellent games coverage at the San Jose Mercury News site offers up a gamers buying guide for HD TVs. Dean Takahashi discusses the basics every HD purchaser should know, some technical issues with recent plasma and LCD advances in mind, and addresses the specific problems that gamers will face with their new purchases. From the article: "If you accidentally set your PS3 for 1080p resolution, when the TV can only support 720p, you get a black screen. The Westinghouse TV I used displayed a message that said 'invalid format.' To reset the PS3 to the standard AV format, you shut the PS3 off. Then you hold the PS3's power button down for about 10 seconds. It will reset to standard video. If you have the Nintendo Wii, you won't have to upgrade your standard/enhanced definition TV as the Wii's best resolution is 480p. It's thankfully simple, but you get a sixth of the pixels on screen as you do with a full HDTV with a PS3."
Related Stories
[+]
Xbox 360 adds 1080p Support 349 comments
jayintune writes "2old2play has received news from the TGS (Tokyo Game Show) that Microsoft plans on releasing an update that will enable 1080p support on their Xbox 360 console. From the article, "users can expect 1080p upscaling immediately on current games and DVDs while native 1080p on compatible HD DVD titles." What could this mean for Sony now that MS has 1080p as well?" Now honestly, show of hands: who has their console (not PC!) connected to a display device capable of 1080p? Who plans on buying a device capable of 1080p?
[+]
News: New Larger TVs Favor LCD Over Plasma 211 comments
Information Week is carrying a Reuters story examining the shift towards LCD technology in recent large-screen television models. Though some analysts acknowledge that plasma displays have faster response times over large surfaces, the industry seems to be betting that consumers will prefer higher resolution images over time. From the article: "CPT's Wu agrees that plasma panels, especially 50-inch and larger ones, do excel LCDs in some aspects of picture quality, but he says the sheer size of the LCD camp will help LCD panels overcome whatever drawbacks they have in a timely manner ...With the 40-inch-class market gradually taken over by LCD TVs, plasma models need to migrate to the market for 50-inch TVs and above, but demand is not as well developed there, analysts say. 'The United States accounts for more than 70 percent of demand for 50-inch plasma TVs and larger. In other words, there is virtually no 50-inch-class plasma TV market outside the United States,' DisplaySearch director Hisakazu Torii said."
This discussion has been archived.
No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
Full
Abbreviated
Hidden
Loading... please wait.
No mention of HDTV lag (Score:5, Informative)
This can be frustrating in action or rhythm games (Which is why Guitar Hero 2 has an option to compensate for it). I don't have an HDTV, so I'm not sure how bad it is but some google-fu should find plenty more on the subject.
Re:No mention of HDTV lag (Score:5, Funny)
"lucky shot n00b cuz if my tv wasnt lagging..."
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
You'll soon be able to pick the ones with the slow image processors - they're the ones that are perceptibly behind the rest.
Of course, this doesn't show the fact that they're *all* behind a little bit, but it does help weed out the crap ones.
Stores don't help. (Score:5, Interesting)
At another one, everyone was crowded around the one "good looking" TV, because it was the only one displaying an HD image. All the other TVs had been tuned to an analog channel, and looked like crap by comparison.
Until the major-market stores get their act together, it's going to be very difficult to shop for or compare HDTVs in any meaningful way. I went out to look at them in person because I thought it was ridiculous to shop for a TV without going and judging the PQ of various models in person, but I left feeling that it would just be better to shop from specs -- any subjective evaluation would have been rendered meaningless by the poor setup and conditions in stores. (The solution would have been to go to a "real" home theater store, but since I'm probably not going to pay their prices (as much as I'd like to support an independent/local, and feel guilty about it) I've hesitated to visit any.)
Everything about HD is screwy right now. Manufacturers don't know what people want, so there are products out there that are either flat-out crappy or just mis-designed; stores aren't bothering to train their employees about how to explain or sell the new technology, making the job of a potential buyer even harder; not to mention that average people range seem to be ambivalent about the whole upgrade business. HDTV isn't like color, where once you saw it, you understood the change and could go out and buy one; it's an obvious upgrade when it's done right, but it can be a morass if it's not.
Parent
Re:Stores don't help. (Score:5, Insightful)
It does suck that they couldn't just run a 1080p signal to all of the 1080p TVs from one source. Really makes me worried that the new 1080p TVs are just too wrapped up in HDCP to be worth the extra expense. I'd rather have analog back if it means that we will actually be allowed to see a better picture, instead of being stuck with some unrealized capability of doing so.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I ran into this very same dilemma (Future Shop in Canada, akin to Best Buy - and I believe owned by them). Here' s what I did - I took a Powerbook to the store with a DVD in it, along with the various video cables.
I knew that any HDTV I bought would have to hook up thru at least VGA and prefera
Resolution (Score:4, Insightful)
From the article:
Wow, this guy finally figured out what us PC gamers have known for about a decade now! Who'da thunk it?
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I know this goes against what some people will say but I would rather run a game at 800x600 with 8xAA and 8xAF then have the same game at 1280x1024 with no AA and AF.
Re:Resolution (Score:4, Insightful)
See, you've just proven my point: you consider 800x600 to be low resolution! For console gamers, this would be high resolution -- standard for them is 484 interlaced lines. When you start getting that low, it becomes really bad no matter how much anti-aliasing you use. For example, try playing Half-Life on the PS2 sometime. It sucks horribly, mostly due to the low resolution (the remainder of the sucking is due to the horrible controls).
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Until now, console games were designed for SD, so textures and images wouldn't have those artifacts unless you had a bad artist.
Westinghouse LVM-42W2 is great (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Westinghouse LVM-42W2 is great (Score:4, Informative)
Our office bought the LVM-42W2 for video conferencing over the summer. Since then, 4 of us have bought the exact same model. It's got tons of inputs (all the various analog ones, 1 VGA, 2 DVI, 1 HDMI). It can do 1080p. It is cheap - finding it for $1500 is not hard, I think. I haven't run into any quirks.
The difference between the Westinghouse and the $3000 Samsung is that the Samsung has lots of nice filters on it, whereas the Westinghouse only has the standard brightness/contrast/etc. Three points:
1) Your 1080p/1080i source doesn't need any expensive upconverting filter technologies.
2) You'll want a nicer up-converting image for DVD sources. This can be remedied by buying a nice $100 DVD player which does the up-conversion, instead of having the TV do it.
3) Unless you have lots of nice TVs at home already, you won't be able to tell the difference between the Westinghouse and a $3000 set once you get it in your living room. The only way to see that the $3000 set has a marginally better picture is to put them next to each other.
So, the extra $1500 in cost goes away once you take the set home, and in the worst case can be remedied by buying a nice DVD player (cost: $100).
I friggin' love my TV and, at $1500, my wife even let my buy it.
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
What frame of existence do you live in that says $1500 for a TV is cheap?
When my current TV (27") dies and I can replace it for $300 I'll do it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
One silver lining for PC people (Score:4, Interesting)
He left out something important (Score:5, Interesting)
That ensures that EVERYTHING you watch will be scaled, so you couldn't even have the clarity of watching 720p on a 1280x720 set.
Yet the 1280x720 sets, with lower resolutions, cost more.
Welcome to The Market.
Re: (Score:2)
But 720p with my Mac Mini looks horrible, and is clearly NOT running in native resolution. This is a very important issue with any fixed-pixel display, and the writer of this article should be ashamed for not mentioning it.
HDTV is a clusterfuck. (Score:4, Interesting)
I wonder if you have a 1366x768 display, if you could bypass the internal scaler by feeding it a DVI signal from an HTPC, and then use the HTPC to position the 1280x720p frame in the center of the 1366x768 one, thus giving you an unscaled image?
Any TV designer who automatically scales 1280x768 up to 1366x768 without an option to turn it off and just display it with black bars ought to be shot.
Parent
Anything but plasma (Score:2, Informative)
I can make it even simpler (Score:2, Insightful)
There is no Step Two.
DLP (Score:2)
The only downside is you can't hang them on a wall. To me that isn't a problem. I still have a component rack with my receiver, DVD player, etc in it and my front floor standing speakers. A TV on the wall would be out of place
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Don't let fud like this scare you out of getting a great looking and much cheaper DLP screen. If it has lag, which is very unlikely then take it bac
Lone voice in the wilderness (Score:5, Interesting)
With that said, personally, I just want an old-fashioned CRT, and I've been tempted by the likes of these [samsung.com]. No rear projects or having to rethink A/V furniture, no young technologies that have new and interesting problems that have yet to be acceptably solved (be it dead pixels or greater susceptibility to burn-in), not even a rear projection, just good old-fashioned ions-on-phosphorous, and for a reasonable price. However, I'm relutctant to purchase even these because I've yet to see a direct view CRT that supports 1080p, and I see no point in getting a television that doesn't support features that will probably be worth having in the next ten years.
And speaking of "ten years," I want an appliance, not yet another piece of technology that gets thrown out after 3-4 years. If I cannot be reasonably assured that the television I'm considering buying will neither be obsolete in three years nor outright non-functioning, my NTSC set continues to work (from back when the most complicated question I had while shopping was "What kind of inputs does it have?")