Help me buy a TV!

[Zee]

Wow, I thought it wa sjust me and Goldie who knew a thing or two about the AV industry...

I'll pretty much echo what others have said, and aelaberate a touch on the 100hz/200hz thing.

Avoid expensive cables, I use HDMI cables from WES that cost me about $15 for a 2m cable. I've installed 3tv's this weekend, and have yet to have a single one fail or ruin picture quality, and I've put up at least  50 screens this year. alone. I find well priced cables of  reasonable quality can often be found at computer shops. in Sydney anyway.

I have heard that "Cablechick" is a good online retailer of well priced cables. Never tried them myself though, as I have my own sources within the industry. Also, make sure the cable is long enough. The number of times I have walked into a job where the client "had everything", and the Harvey Norman sales guy sold him a 1m Monster cable for what is a 3m run... Measure the length from tv to equipment, then double it. You should be safe 3 - 5m cables are the go for wall mounted screens, 2 meters for the screen on a desk top with equipment underneath, and a meter if  the component is sitting on the same surface as the TV.

100hz/200hz - this is basically refers to how many times the screen is refreshed every second.. There really is very little that can be seen by the human eye between the two, so don't insist on 200hz,

These high scan rates are usually used in conjunction with some sort of frame interpolation system, "smooth motion" or "motionflow", these give you a picture that looks very crisp and smooth, but at the same time, un-natural. When you watch a movie with such a system turned on, it often looks like it was shot with a handycam. Some people (usually those with very little clue) think this makes for a better picutre. Personally, I'm a bit of a purist, I want the movie experience in my home to be as close as possible to the cinema.  

If you have ever seen the raw footage of a movie (usually seen in "making of" sections of special features in DVD's and Blu-Rays), you'll notice the footage looks remarkebly like high quality handy cam footage. Very different to what you see as an end result. This is because movie houses actually pay highly trained people lots of money to put in motion blur,colour and contrast adjustments, even grain, to achieve the look the movie maker wants.

The motionflow systems effectively remove some of this stuff, by adding in frames that did not exist. EG, a movie plays back at about 25 (for simplicity) frames per second in a cinema, when you have a 100hz tv with a smooth motion system turnbed on, it "makes up" 3 of every 4 frames. The result is a smooth picture, at the cost of some of the "cinema look".

I'm not totally against such systems, I think they are cool for sports, and even cartoons, but I'd turn them off for movies and video games (the processing time causes a slight lag for video games).

In terms of which TV - I'd skip over LG. My picks for LCD would be either Samsung or Sony. For plasma, Panasonic, and the 8 series Samsung looked pretty good too, though not sure of the pricing. I tend to put "ease of use" as part of the TV watching experience, but no one really offers a proper remote anymore (with discrete buttons for inputs) though Sony and Samsung to make it easy enough to be able to remove inputs you are not using, this limiting the amount of button pressing between inputs. LG are fine int his regard, I just see more LG's getting waranty repairs than the others. I'd rather spend an extra $100 and have a lower chance of a warranty issue.

*wonders in amazement at how much crap he can dribble whilst sipping a latte at Mecca*

If you have any more questions on specific models, let me know.

Cheers,

Z...

[Betty]

Zee I think we need to talk

EDIT: Oh and well done Dave, making a decision is something I've never been able to overcome

[heatherp]

thats ok Heather we can share beds

Better make it a large bed as it looks like we are all sharing 

[bazz20]

Better make it a large bed as it looks like we are all sharing 

what all of us , i fart and snore 

[heatherp]

what all of us , i fart and snore 

Thanks for the warning.   

[Jukie]

yer great bazz thanks for that

[bazz20]

we can play dutch ovens 

[CairnsDuc]

Hmmmmm Cables............

I am a product designer for a company that also manufactures cables (but in a different industry).
I'm not going to elaborate but the extra price does not justify the extra performance (in the industry I'm in anyway). You are essentially paying for a group of designers, lab technicians, sales people and marketers revamping and reviving exisitng product lines, and this does cost a lot of money.

And in a vast Majority of Industries, it is more than Justified to pay the extra for better Cables.
But for the average audio/visual setup, it is just overpriced crap and hype, and thanks to a number of performance comparisons, it has been proven that some of the biggest and most expensive Cables made little to no Difference to the quality of the Picture/sound.

Sound and Image Magazine a number of years ago did an interesting comparison, they compared some medium priced cables through to Extreme high end Cables. The Medium Cables performed the exact same quality job of picture and sound, they even included a full electronic test to ensure it was accurate.
Value for Money and quality, the Medium priced Cables won every time.

[Zee]

..And, you wont be as pissed off when your new kitten chews through your $40/m Nordost speaker cable...

Z...

[goldFiSh]

Whist I generally agree with all sentiment regarding cables "marketing" cables, I can tell you from 1st hand experience that there is instances where it really does count, but those instances usually require two things not found in a typical home setup - extreme resolutions and distance.

<techno babble starts here>
I'm talking sending greater than 1080p resolutions over 20 or more metres, typically from multiple sources distributed to multiple end points via matrix switchers, often to receiving devices with differing native resolutions, aspects and the like. This requires the use of fibre transmission, EDID managers, scalers  etc. Then we get into SMPTE vs VESA formats, copy protection... the list goes on and on..... yeeesh, video used to be the easy part of AV!

... back to your normal programming.

[mostro900]

Nick, that's techno porn speak !! chuck in a few more TLA's !   [thumbsup]

frankly, I'm glad you and zee are around. So much friggin techno babble with TV's these days....oh, the good old days of black & white! 

[goldFiSh]

TLA's require me to move more in the ITC convergence space of my business than the traditional AVC space. Lets take it to the sidebar to discuss some more :-)

[Big T]

....oh, the good old days of black & white!  

Aaahhhh the good old days "before" TV........    

Shit now I'm showing my age.....    

PS: Thanks for the great advice from you all...... I'm looking as well....   

[Spider]

and of course it's diffecult to say "buy a sony" they have what, 5 or 6 levels of LCD these days.

I think 200hz is a rort....well it is....to my eyes!

will say one thing about HDMI cables....the upscaling of DVD through a blu ray is amazing....that seems to work really well (I was sceptical)....so do get a hdmi cable...just don't blow hundreds on it.

[Jukie]

black and white huh?