Cautious to upgrade my TV...
andy614
Posts: 45,259 Forum Member
✭
I'm aware that i'm probably the only one left in the country but i still have a CRT television. Now it's a very good one, the picture is very good and i'm happy with that, but I would like a bigger one and it is of course cumbersome compared to flat screen tv's, so that would be an advantage.
The thing is, whenever i have gone into the shops and looked at TV, any tv apart from the mega expensive ones seem to have a far worse picture than what i currently have. Either fuzzy, or blocky/pixelated or dodgy motion. I'm not on about the budget options/makes either.
Is this just the case? Is this what i'm going to have to just accept if i want/need a new TV? Is it just the way they are set up in store or something?
The thing is, whenever i have gone into the shops and looked at TV, any tv apart from the mega expensive ones seem to have a far worse picture than what i currently have. Either fuzzy, or blocky/pixelated or dodgy motion. I'm not on about the budget options/makes either.
Is this just the case? Is this what i'm going to have to just accept if i want/need a new TV? Is it just the way they are set up in store or something?
0
Comments
Certainly Sony LCD's generally give a better picture than the old CRT you're replacing, and I've installed hundreds - but to be fair most of the better makes do as well.
The situation in a shop isn't a very good place to compare though, and (just as with a CRT) you have to sit far enough away to watch SD programming.
There's also the fact that LCD's (and Plasma as well) are 'different' to CRT - it's something you need to get used to.
I would urge you to get a full HD screen rather than just a hd ready one. You get a higher resolution with full HD. I went from a Sony hd ready lcd to a full HD Sony and the upgrade is quite clear to see.
Unless you have it already you need to invest in a hd source, such as sky hd, freesat hd, freeview hd or cable hd. Bluray is another source of hd content. If you don't do any of these there won't be much point in changing the tv.
Some sets (some hd ready sets and some full HD ones) have freeview HD built in. These can decode any available hd channels on freeview without needing a box (provided u have a working aerial in good condition). Be aware freeview HD is not a standard feature on any set, not even full HD sets.
Get as many Hdmi sockets as possible. You will need these for connecting the hd equipment. Scart is now a dead technology. Some sets inc my one still have a single scart for connecting legacy eauipment. Many now have a custom connection which is small and a lot like hdmi in style, but into which you plug a simple dongle which has a single scart on the other end.
You may find the sound on lcd TVs to be worse. Generally the very thin sets have the worse sound. The less slim ones like my Sony have slightly better sound, but you may find none of them match the sound from the in built speakers on your CRT. You may want to consider external extra speakers or sound bar. While on the subject of sound, if you need a headphone socket....make sure the tv has one.....as part of cost cutting this is now being dropped from some TVs.
I would suggest that's more likely because the Full HD set is a more modern one, although it would be fairly rare now to even find a new HD Ready set (apart from really small ones).
But certainly in the past a good HD Ready set gave a far better picture than a cheap Full HD set - and on similar quality sets the difference was pretty well non-existent. We used to have a full 'wall' of 32 inch Sony sets, all displaying the same programme - I couldn't pick out which ones were Full HD and which ones weren't
As always, look at the specific sets you're considering, and compare them - don't pay excessive attention to random and pretty pointless numbers.
Part of it is this ^
Pretty much everything you can buy now is just one technology - LCD (liquid crystal display) - though you'll see the majority of these TVs referred to as LED instead (light emitting diode) which is the type of light behind the panel and nothing to do with the actual bit responsible for creating the image.
All of these sets are way brighter than CRT TVs. They can (in most cases) produce a much bigger colour range than CRT. It actually exceeds what's required for modern TV pictures. Despite these advantages, the manufacturers still feel the need to make their TVs "shout" at a customer when on display. This is done in the settings menu by putting the picture on Dynamic mode. This maxes out contrast, makes the image over-sharpened, throws in too much colour, screws up the black/shadow detail and sets most of the picture processing to the highest settings as well.
The other thing it does is an age-old trick of making the colour balance too blue. This makes whites stand out more but has the side effect of screwing up the colour rendition for every other colour. If you have a look at faces then you'll notice they're often magenta (mixed red/blue) rather than pink for Caucasians. To fix this they add a dollop of extra red at the frequency that corresponds to Caucasian skin. They break something and then break another thing else to "fix" it lol.
On top of these issues you have sales people in big stores who haven't a clue what a decent TV picture should actually look like. They're impressed by blistering brightness and day-glo colours. I'm not entirely sure why it is, but when there's a moving image then the average person seems to forget what people actually look like and the way trees and grass and structures should look. If you remember putting in films for developing, if the processor gave you your pictures back with the same kind of picture seetings as most TVs you'd throw them back and say "That's not what it looked like when I took the picture". Yet with TV and film we accept the awful rendition of most TVs.
There's a two stage fix for a lot of this. The first part involves buying and using a picture set-up disc. They're £30-£40 and viewed with scepticism by many. However, as a professional image calibrator myself I can tell you hand on heart that they work wonders for the average TV.
[The sub-stage here is usually "How can I do this for free?" or "Whose settings can I use?"
Some of the set up you can do with downloaded patterns if your PC has a Blu-ray burner or you have a media player that will play the HD media files. You'll be able to do contrast, brightness and sharpness. What you can't do though without the colour filters that come with a purchased disc is look at the colour and tint settings. The purchased test discs also have tutorials to show you what you're adjusting and why. They'll help too with more exotic settings such as Gamma (shadow detail), Colour Temperature, and motion processing.
Using someone else's settings rarely works. The reason is that your TV picture adjustments are in part influenced by the lighting conditions in your room. This is particularly the case with brightness and to a lesser extent Gamma. These then have a knock-on effect over contrast, colour and tint. So using someone else's settings where there room is brighter or darker than yours means that the rest of their settings will be different too. Also, there's no guarantee they set the TV up correctly. I guarantee that the picture of the TV will look different with some settings from a random post. But different doesn't mean better. ]
Good discs to use are [for the novice] Disney WoW (World of Wonder) and Digital Video Essentials HD Basics.
If you wish to really make a TV sing then the second stage is a professional calibration. That's when someone like me turns up with test gear and a light meter and in effect tunes-out all the imperfections in the set to get it as close to reference as the TV will allow. Some in the calibration community just address the colour palette of the TV. Others (myself included) do a whole picture chain calibration. That's a more involved process and takes longer, but it yields far better results. In the end it's down to money and expectations. Calibration is anything from £200 for a basic to over £400 for a complete system.
Typical initial customer reactions after a system calibration are "Wow, look at the colours!" or "I can see so much more detail." This is because all the subtle colour shades that were obscured before now become viewable. Also, when the sharpness and motion processing are optimised then it removes the edge enhancement and false contours added by the processing and allows the real picture detail to be seen.
So, what you see in store is a long way from what's actually possible with TV that's been well sorted. Invest £40 in a test disc and you'll have a tool that will make most TVs significantly better. Professional calibration is a valuable process, and the benefits are even more apparent greater with lower priced TVs, but it's sometimes difficult to justify when the TV cost is £500-£600.
As usual, misleading partial 'nonsense'
TV's have a 'shop display mode', this is to compensate for the extra bright lighting inside a shop - and shouldn't be used at home (unless you want to of course).
If it's set to 'Home' mode in the bright shop conditions then the picture will look crap, you need to compensate for the unusual conditions - CRT was no different, although often the default setting was demo mode (presumably on the basis that shop staff were too thick to set it themselves?).
Almost all modern TV's will ask during initial installation if you want 'Home' or 'Shop', and you simply need to select 'Home' for fairly decent settings calibrated in the factory - you can them 'tweak' from there if you wish.
As usual, misleading partial 'nonsense' (Sorry Nigel, but that was a gift)
CRT TVs were never capable of generaring the sort of brute force light output that LCDs can make.
Others maybe set in "vibrant" picture mode - which is overly bright, over saturated, burned out.
But, quite a lot of people seem to like the vibrant mode - the same people who when they had a colour tv first would turn the colour control all the way up! If you turned it back to look more "normal" they would say some thing like "cant see the colour".
Whereas larger stores don't bother, and have their own terrible low quality SD demo channel fed to all sets. Hence they look terrible.
Make sure you stand as far from the TV in the shop as you would sit from it at home.
Modern TVs beat CRTs in most respects.
Cheers,
David.
Not very far off it, but regardless they commonly had shop 'demo' modes (which was VERY often the default setting) where the brightness, contrast and colour were all far too high for normal domestic use.
Prior to the demo modes you had to independently 'turn up' every set you put on display.
When measured in a very specific way (10% Peak White) then yes CRTs could generate a momentary burst of high brightness, but only at the expense of very poor geometry due to inadequate power supply regulation. There are test patterns for this that show the effect of the frame shape changing as a 10% peak white window flashes on/off at 1 second intervals. When the TV picture needed high levels of brightness for a larger portion of the screen than 10% then the average screen brightness diminished. This is because the power wasn't concentrated in a small patch but spread over a much larger area. The sets would often whistle too from ocillation in the circuits as a signal that the TV was being driven too hard.
However, one doesn't need test patterns or measurements. The simple fact is that LCD/LED flatscreens can be used in places where CRTs wouldn't have produced a watchable image. That's proof enough. Look on the High Street. There's plenty of shops now that use digital point of sale displays not just because TVs got thinner, but also because they got a whole lot brighter.
As for old CRTs having a demo mode, that's kind of academic. The basic principle still followed by TV manufacturers is the same as it's always been. "Brighter pictures catch the eye" The maker that shouts loudest gets the most attention.
Again, not really true - the high ambient brightness in a shop requires the TV's to be a LOT brighter and have more contrast etc. in order to look similar to how they will in a home under normal lighting conditions.
LCD's look crap in a shop if not in demo mode, and so did CRT's - my complaint for MANY years was that many CRT's defaulted to shop demo mode, and we were endlessly going round setting them correctly for people.
The simple, plain and absolute fact is that in retail displays the TV with the brightest and most colourful image is the one that tends to draw the eye of the buyer. TV manufacturers know this and have done for more than 50 years. As a retailer so should you.
Look back to the days when colour TV was first introduced. Colour tubes had much poorer light output than their monochrome counterparts. The efficiency of 3 colour phosphors was nowhere near as high as B&W. Consequently the new colour sets looked dull by comparison to monochrome TVs in a side-by-side display. This was when the manufacturers found out that changing the colour balance to favour bluey whites help improve the appearance of screen brightness from colour TVs. That trend has continued to this day - some 50+ years later.
The only real difference with modern flat screen TVs is that they're capable of far higher light output than older CRT TVs. If you truly believe that demo mode somehow replicates the "at home" performance of a TV but just tweaked up to compensate for store lighting brightness then you've been taken for a ride. It's nothing of the sort. It's there to ensure that the TV puts out as much light, and as strong a tint to blue, and with all the processing toys switched on, and that the TV stays that way despite customer fiddling. It's nothing more than battle of the loudest.
If you have calibration gear go measure the colour temperature of the TV in demo mode. I bet you don't get anything less than 7500K at 60%- 80%- and 100% white. I've measured some TVs at 11,500K in past!
Sorry, but utter nonsense - it's simply to replicate (as much as possible) how it will look in a home environment.
It's even more utter nonsense that the settings can't be altered, you can turn them down to anywhere you like - and many people start off from shop mode and turn down from there.