Large screen HDTV: Plasma vs LCD?

gismo

gismo

Touchdown! Greaser!
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iGismo
My main TV just died and probably isn't worth fixing. I've been thinking about upgrading to HDTV anyway and this seems like an opportune time. The current set is a 36" (4:3)CRT and the household concensus is that it's big enough so I'm thinking along the lines of a 43-45" 16:9 display. The set is in a family room that gets a fair amount of sun during the day so screen brightness is an issue.

There's a LCD unit that I'm considering by Sharp, model LC45GDU. Best Buy has it for $4800, the lowest internet price I've seen is $4200. There are some 42" plasma models for $3-4k that also look good from Phillips, Pioneer, Samsung, and LG.

I think that in general, LCD's can be brighter but have less contrast than plasma. I also understand that plasma is subject to burn-in like a CRT and LCD's generally are not. Are there any other reasons why I should choose one over the other?
 
Lance,

Plasma tends to have a shorter life than LCD. It is susceptable to burn in.

Two years ago, I bought a CRT widescreen and I've been pretty happy with it. I also got a Samsung DTV (off-air) tuner.

Remember to get true HD, you will need to buy a separate tuner (unless you've got cable and they're providing it). Satellite will require a special satellite box, and there's limited amount of programming running on satellite at the moment.
 
lancefisher said:
I think that in general, LCD's can be brighter but have less contrast than plasma. I also understand that plasma is subject to burn-in like a CRT and LCD's generally are not. Are there any other reasons why I should choose one over the other?
Click to expand...
Lance, I'm very happy with a $2700 View Sonic 1180 line display (42") from ECost.com. I finally put it to a Sony 7.1 system with HK two element speakers and for movies it's tough to beat. The speakers and 7.1 decoder 100Wx7 was about $800 combined.

ViewSonic
VPW4255 42in Plasma HD Display
Changes your perspective. Clear Picture electronics optimize the ultra-high 1,100 CD/M2 BRIGHTNESS to deliver clearly amazing images. 1024 x 1024 - True High Definition Viewing!
eCOST.com Part #2587334
Mfg. Part #VPW4255

It has inputs for everything- and will do all your switching if you want it to; I let the Sony do the switching so the family can treat it like a TV. WE only do HD for DVD movies (they have 5.1 and 7.1 sound!). The price went UP (It was on a "we have 150 of them...special) at the time.
 
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I'm quite happy with my 42" Toshiba (model 32HL84) LCD. Although HD capable, I'm not inclined to spend the additional $15 a month for cable HD. The nice part is that it has 4 viewing modes which allow me to chose widescreen. When running a widescreen movie, it fits perfectly. Lots of inputs (8) so you get to connect all your favorite toys to it.
 
My situation is somewhat unique. I have a handicapped 13 year old that we built a special room for where he could be confined, but observed. It functions as a second family room. He watches Barney videos continuously. So we installed two Sony 42" plasmas. The reason for the choice is that they have a solid strong piece of glass over the screen. We could mount them on the wall and built a wood frame around them so he couldn't get to the cables. Then ran the cables into a lockable closet where we have all of the control boxes. This gives us a room where we can watch what we want while he can watch Barney. We have had this for a little over a year and it has worked well. He can't hurt the TV's. He hangs on them and "pats" them pretty hard.

The picture is very good. We don't have access to HD so I can't comment on that.

If little children are going to be around, this seems like a pretty good choice for durability and safety from prying little hands and the occasional tossed toy.
 
bbchien said:
Lance, I'm very happy with a $2700 View Sonic 1180 line display (42") from ECost.com. I finally put it to a Sony 7.1 system with HK two element speakers and for movies it's tough to beat. The speakers and 7.1 decoder 100Wx7 was about $800 combined.

It has inputs for everything- and will do all your switching if you want it to; I let the Sony do the switching so the family can treat it like a TV. WE only do HD for DVD movies (they have 5.1 and 7.1 sound!). The price went UP (It was on a "we have 150 of them...special) at the time.
Click to expand...
This is what happens when you show a smart guy how to fish.

Bruce, you haven't heard how hollywood is determined to screw up HD DVD. I won't be buying a device that decides if my TV is allowed to see it.

If we all refuse to buy they will have to back off.

We should already be screaming that they put in the "fast forward not allowed."
 
Ah, but it doesn't. The VS 4255 is nothing but a computer monitor with a boodle of switching - HDMI inputs, Analog, Component, S-vid, Fiberoptic....and a similar bunch of outputs. Has an NTSC tuner (that's about a $10 item). It's the DVD player that has me worried- but ours is an older one with optical and HDMI outputs.

If they screw us...they screw us. It's like medical liability. Like Spark's career getting trashed. Like....well, you have to live in the interim.

Sigh.
 
Lance,
I recently purchased a 30 Inch LCD for my office and a 50 Inch LCD to replace
an old projection set. Iwas convinced during the shopping that the LCD had a longer shelf life than the Plasma set. May not be true but they convinced me.

Jim
 
You need to think DLP. Wife sells applicances to the government and raves about them.

Brent Bradford.
 
lancefisher said:
My main TV just died and probably isn't worth fixing. I've been thinking about upgrading to HDTV anyway and this seems like an opportune time. The current set is a 36" (4:3)CRT and the household concensus is that it's big enough so I'm thinking along the lines of a 43-45" 16:9 display. The set is in a family room that gets a fair amount of sun during the day so screen brightness is an issue.

There's a LCD unit that I'm considering by Sharp, model LC45GDU. Best Buy has it for $4800, the lowest internet price I've seen is $4200. There are some 42" plasma models for $3-4k that also look good from Phillips, Pioneer, Samsung, and LG.

I think that in general, LCD's can be brighter but have less contrast than plasma. I also understand that plasma is subject to burn-in like a CRT and LCD's generally are not. Are there any other reasons why I should choose one over the other?
Click to expand...

Hi Lance,

A couple of comments:

If you can afford it, get a set with 1080 native vertical resolution. Most HDTV LCDs so far are 720 (most plasmas are 480). We have a 46" Samsung in the lab at work that is native 1080 side by side with a 720 set, and it is spectacular. We played "Ice Age" using a DVHS tape (1080 resolution) and the crispness is unreal. We ran the same movie on 6 other LCD sets, 2 plasmas and a large CRT. The 46" Samsung kicked all.

Get the best cables and drive the unit with the best signal you can get. Dish or cable HD. Also get a progressive scan DVD player.
$5000 dollar set + crappy signal= well you get the picture.

Eric

PS: I have some Dual-Lock coming - still need it?
________
Lovely Wendie99
 
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bubba said:
Hi Lance,

A couple of comments:

If you can afford it, get a set with 1080 native vertical resolution. Most HDTV LCDs so far are 720 (most plasmas are 480). We have a 46" Samsung in the lab at work that is native 1080 side by side with a 720 set, and it is spectacular. We played "Ice Age" using a DVHS tape (1080 resolution) and the crispness is unreal. We ran the same movie on 6 other LCD sets, 2 plasmas and a large CRT. The 46" Samsung kicked all.

Get the best cables and drive the unit with the best signal you can get. Dish or cable HD. Also get a progressive scan DVD player.
$5000 dollar set + crappy signal= well you get the picture.


PS: I have some Dual-Lock coming - still need it?
Click to expand...

I think my DVD is already progressive capable, I just got it a year or so ago and that was one feature I wanted then for future use. The HD plasmas all seem to be something like 1200 x 768. The one LCD I've been looking into (Sharp LC45GD4U) is 1920 x 1080. I've done a lot of surfing since I made the post at the top of this thread and it looks like plasma is a lot more burn resistant than before but it's still an issue. Supposedly the problems are much worse in the first hundred and slightly worse in the first thousand hours of use. Apparently some LCD monitors have experienced a "burn in" as well although the evidence is sparse. LCD's used to be slower to change pixels (motion blur) but some newer ones including the Sharp advertize 12 ms which is faster than an image can be generated. LCD's are quite a bit brighter than plasma especially when you turn the light output down on the plasma as recommended for long life. The biggest remaining downside on LCD's appears to be constrast, they just don't get as dark as CRT's or plasma. The Sharp claims 800:1 contrast, Pana's plasma is rated at 3000:1. I suspect that this might not be all that important in a well lit room but would be quite noticeable in a dimmer environment.

WRT the tape, I got mine replaced in Florida. They were using the VHB adhesive and have now switched to the rubber based adhesive (which is exactly backwards from what I would have thought). I probably will need some next year some time as they recommend replacing the stuff once every year or so. Meanwhile I haven't been skiing much since I ripped up a finger when a ski handle shattered in my hands a few weeks ago.
 
Brent Bradford said:
You need to think DLP. Wife sells applicances to the government and raves about them.
Click to expand...

My wife wants to hang it on the wall so I think DLP is out. Also from what I've seen all RP displays including DLP has significantly less viewing angle than any direct view display and that's important in my situation.
 
lancefisher said:
The biggest remaining downside on LCD's appears to be constrast, they just don't get as dark as CRT's or plasma. The Sharp claims 800:1 contrast, Pana's plasma is rated at 3000:1. I suspect that this might not be all that important in a well lit room but would be quite noticeable in a dimmer environment.
Click to expand...

Lance,

My new LCD has a contrast of 750:1 and it looks fine to me.

greg
 
river_rat said:
Lance,

My new LCD has a contrast of 750:1 and it looks fine to me.

greg
Click to expand...

Well, it's over and done except for paying the credit card bill. Installed even (sort of).

I went with a Sharp 45" LCD HDTV (LC-45GD4U) which has a native resolution of 1920x1080. I compared some plasma displays with LCD's and concluded I would be quite happy with the LCD and not having to worry about someone leaving the thing on "bad" channel for a day was a factor in the decision. I also noticed that there were some artifacts on the plasma sets that I couldn't see on the full resolution LCD and I suspect they are a result of imperfect resampling. The displayed images were coming from a digital satellite receiver.

Anyway everybody at home is happy with the product so far. At this point my only complaint is that the "Universal" remote only works with Sharp home theater systems. I'm looking into digital cable as a source (I have analog now which has no HDTV). I also connected a UHF Yagi I had lying around and was actually able to get all the local HDTV signals with the antenna sitting on a chair in my family room. This is quite surprising since I'm shooting through a wall, a roof, a fully leafed forest, up a hill to antennas that are at least 30 miles away. I wouldn't be surprised to see the signal go down when the roof and trees are wet though.

The manual that comes with the set is crap though. There are something like 50 connections you can make and there aren't even any descriptions of the ports except for some hard to read diagrams indicating "typical" hookups.
 
Buy one of each but have them shipped to me.

I'll do a comprehensive, in depth analysis and send you back the one I don't like as much. :D
 
Lance I know you know better, so if you need cables try http://bestbuycable.com/ I got some good ones from them and they were very good about taking them back when I ordered the wrong type of HDMI<->DVI cable.

The best cables and most reasonably priced I found are from Cal-Rad. The aggravating thing is that there is about no place on the web that has a decent site for buying them. They mainly have 2-year-old catalog pages online in .pdf files and web resellers where you're supposed to order by part number. It is worth it to go through that. The cables are amazing quality. I have some component video cables that are near broadcast quality.

Try http://froogle.google.com to search for Cal-Rad.
 
larrysb said:
The biggest weakness of the LCD flat panel displays is black-levels. Turn the lights out, turn on the LCD with no input and you'll see a fairly bright grey, rather than black.

They work great as computer displays and LCD tv's look great in the showrooms of stores because they are in brightly lit conditions. The LCD screen absorbs light, and it has a high-appearant contrast under these conditions.

But under living-room lighting conditions, where most of us do our TV viewing, the poor blacks come out. Watch a sci-fi flick on one with lots of space scenes, or a mystery with a lot of shadowy scenes and the weak blacks become readily appearant.
Click to expand...

Actually, the lighting in the HDTV section of the store seems dimmer than my family room is most of the time. In any case the LCD I bought claims 800:1 contrast and it does actually look black in my house with our "normal" light levels. Earlier LCD's were straining to get 200:1 and for that matter many plasmas don't come close to 1000:1 either. On the burn in issue, I spent a lot of time reading posts about it on various videophile webboards and from that I concluded that the newest Panasonic plasma displays are approaching the burn resistance of contemporary CRT's but only after a 100-1000 hr "aging" period. I do see that part of the hysteria is because many users don't distinguish between actual "burn in" (non-uniform aging) and "retention" a fairly short term phenominom that has the same appearance as "burn in". That said, many had seen cases where constant artifacts like the logo in the SciFi channel would persist for weeks if that channel was watched a lot during the first hundred hours of use. It also seems that much of the problem is pretty subtle and often requires the display of a uniform grey to actually see it, although this may be partly because human vision is quite capable of overlooking faint stationary artifacts.

Anyway, knowing how difficult it is to render a digital image at any resolution that's not a multiple of the original coupled with what I saw that looked like artifacts of resampling on the high end plasmas, I concluded that 1080 rows of pixels has some noticeable advantages when it comes to picture quality.
 
larrysb said:
If you want flat panel and you want >45", your only choice is plasma.
Click to expand...

I saw the 80" diag. Samsung LCD set at the SID show in Boston this year. I used to think that 60" was the LCD maximum too.
Several LCD glass makers have built generation 7 and 8 plants in Asia producing TFT motherglass sizes between 1.5-2 meters.

Eric
________
Lovely Wendie99
 
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