Agreed, SD Freeview is poor on an LCD and TV viewing has given little pleasure over the last few years, instead I've relied on Blu-Ray, console, and HTPC sources.
However, since our DSO last month, the addition of a £60 Freeview HD box (with USB recording and DD5.1 transcoding) has transformed the situation - probably the largest TV step-change since colour IMO.
OK only 4 channels on terrestrial (just like TV of old) but everything becomes so much more watchable, the LCD is much happier with this kind of input. So please don't disregard broadcast HD.
I would have liked to have kept the CRT and put it in an upstairs bedroom but it took 2 grown men to lift it out into the van :eek: It would have taken up too much space - but it was a great TV and I never had any problems with it apart from its bulk.
If it was smaller than a 32, then presumably it was a 28? - it's best lifted with two people, but they really aren't that heavy - I've carried them upstairs on my own occasionally.
It's the 36 inch ones that are heavy, with some at 120kg :eek:
They used to say 'four man lift' on the box, but you can';t get four people round it and carry it through a doorway
If it was smaller than a 32, then presumably it was a 28? - it's best lifted with two people, but they really aren't that heavy - I've carried them upstairs on my own occasionally.
It's the 36 inch ones that are heavy, with some at 120kg :eek:
They used to say 'four man lift' on the box, but you can';t get four people round it and carry it through a doorway
What ever happended to the good old HD CRT Link here
I have a 32 inch Panasonic CRT with prologic sound, when I moved in to the house I am in now, I had the set put in my bedroom, it took 3 men (myself, a friend and my dad) to carry the set because it is so heavy, and we still managed to drop it on concrete outside my front door, we slid the set up the stairs upsidedown and managed to put it on it's stand. Fortunatly the set survived the bump only to have some slight casing damage, and the set is still working.
What ever happended to the good old HD CRT Link here
HD CRT sets were absolutely crap, only low resolution, with poor pictures - very few manufacturers ever bothered in the UK, and soon dropped them. The only ones I've seen have come in as scrap, as people replace them with vastly superior LCD sets.
HD CRT sets were absolutely crap, only low resolution, with poor pictures
That Samsung one was poor, but I saw plenty of good ones in the states. Resolution was fine. Brightness and size were limited though. There were already plenty of capable PC monitors of high resolution around long before HDTV.
That Samsung one was poor, but I saw plenty of good ones in the states. Resolution was fine. Brightness and size were limited though. There were already plenty of capable PC monitors of high resolution around long before HDTV.
Cheers,
David.
There was one good one in the states, the sony fine pitch was the only one that even approached full HD. The rest were junk which only actually were able to render ED resolution even if they could technically call themselves HD simply because of the beam line scan count regardless of the result.
During the SD era the high end computer monitors only got to around 1600x1200 which is close but the wrong aspect ratio. Not that it mattered since there was no HD video to use on them let alone the power to render it.
I had an old Grundig 30 inch which had a great sd picture ,was the size of a house (i exaggerate) .It died ! luckly sony were doing theyre trade in deal and I bought a new 40inch wow what a difference ,only downside was the sound quality.I do miss the full pro logic dolby ,built in which worked very well ,as for picture it 's sooo much better now and ive only got the s series model of the 5500 series .
Try looking from the correct distance - you obviously need to be a LOT further away for a 50 inch after a 21 inch.
I can still remmeber the old B&W days, with some customers complaining about poor picture quality on 23 inch sets after upgrading from a 19 inch - same reason (but not as extreme)
Sorry to bump an old thread but I came across this while trying to look for an answer to a problem that my dad is having with his new 40" Samsung led tv.
Doesn't sitting further away completely defeat the entire object of having a bigger tv? If that's the care them why not just pay less and get a smaller tv? The whole point of having a bigger tv is so people can enjoy a home cinema experience but what's the point if the majority of stuff is unwatchable?
My dad has tried 2 different smart tv's now and has decided to go back to his old crt.
The main problem is that the majority of programmes aren't transmitted in high definition and bigger tv's can't cope with the upscale of picture and become blocky, fuzzy or jagged.
Another problem he suffered was audio lag. Lcd's need more picture processing so the audio output from his pvr to his surround system is ahead of the picture on the tv making it out of sync. This is ok for watching live tv through the internal speakers but when put through an amp the audio is processed quicker than the picture from the tv. This doesn't happen with crt because the picture isn't processed the same. The only way around this that i've managed to find is to buy an AV amplifier with an audio delay function. On standard definition the picture looks inferior to his old crt and the sound from the internal speakers is far better quality than the tinny sound from his lcd.
The samsung was far better than the Sony Bravia that he also tried which I was surprised as I thought the Sony would have been a lot better. Watching the snooker last night was just awful. The outlines of the balls looked jagged and fuzzy and there's no HD channel for BBC2. The Samsung was a lot better for picture but still suffered with problems with audio. I played around with the hundreds of settings to no avail. That's another thing, the new tv's seem to be ridiculously complicated even for a nerd like myself, setting up the tv is a total nightmare with far too many options for adjusting picture and sound. It all gets a bit too much and the menus are a total minefield with settings such as noise filter, edge enhancement, black control and all the different colour modes, presets and audio options.
He's taking it back today and staying with his old crt until technology gets better. The only way I can see this improving is if they bring out SED tv but due the the legal battles going on I can't see that happening.
I'm dreading the day my widescreen crt packs up because I don't think i'll be able to find anything near as good and if I end up having to buy a new amplifier just to correct a sound lag issue it's gonna cost me a fortune for something which in my opinion is inferior technology.
I don't have a blueray player and don't intend to as most of my dvd's are standard def or old vhs good movie backups. I'm not really bothered about high definition. I just want a good quality led tv that can show a good quality sd picture. Unfortunately I don't think such a thing truly exists.
Sorry to bump an old thread but I came across this while trying to look for an answer to a problem that my dad is having with his new 40" Samsung led tv.
Doesn't sitting further away completely defeat the entire object of having a bigger tv?
My dad has tried 2 different smart tv's now and has decided to go back to his old crt.
The main problem is that the majority of programmes aren't transmitted in high definition and bigger tv's can't cope with the upscale of picture. Another problem he suffered was audio lag. Lcd's need more picture processing so the audio output from his pvr to his surround system is ahead of the picture on the tv making it out of sync. This is ok for watching live tv through the internal speakers but when put through an amp the audio is processed quicker than the picture from the tv. The only way around this that i've managed to find is to buy an av amplifier with an audio delay function. On standard definition the picture looks inferior to his old crt and the sound from the internal speakers is far better quality than the tinny sound from his lcd.
The samsung was far better than the Sony Bravia that he also tried which I was surprised as I thought the Sony would have been a lot better. Watching the snooker last night was just awful. The outlines of the balls looks jagged and fuzzy and there's no HD channel for BBC2. The Samsung was a lot better for picture but still suffered with problems with audio. I player around with the hundreds of settings to no avail. That's another thing, the new tv's seem to be ridiculously complicated even for a nerd lie myself, setting up the tv is a total nightmare with too many options for adjusting picture and sound. It all gets a bit too much and the menus are a total minefield with settings such as noise filter, edge enhancement, black control and all the different colour modes, presets and audio options.
He's taking it back today and staying with his old crt until technology gets better. The only way I can see this improving is if they bring out SED tv but due the the legal battles going on I can't see that happening.
I'm dreading the day my widescreen crt packs up because I don't think i'll be able to find anything near as good and if I end up having to buy a new amplifier just to correct a sound lag issue it's gonna cost me a fortune for something which in my opinion is inferior technology.
Your sound issue is because you're not connecting it correctly, you shouldn't take the audio from the back of your PVR. What you should do is take the optical audio from the back of the TV, this 'should' be in sync with the picture.
But possibly your old amp doesn't have optical inputs?.
As for picture, sounds like he's viewing from too close for SD?.
Your sound issue is because you're not connecting it correctly, you shouldn't take the audio from the back of your PVR. What you should do is take the optical audio from the back of the TV, this 'should' be in sync with the picture.
But possibly your old amp doesn't have optical inputs?.
As for picture, sounds like he's viewing from too close for SD?.
I don't have an optical input on the amp but I did try taking the audio out by pluging a scart to phono adapter into the tv's scart socket but all I got was the audio coming from the tv tuner and not the audio from the Humax box so the audio didn't correspond to the channel I was watching on the pvr. I don't know if the optical out works the same or not but wasn't prepared to go out and spend another £50 buying an optical lead and converter just to find out.
The only other option was to plug it into the tv's headphone socket but that cuts the audio to the tv and we don't always want to use the amp so going round the back and pluging and unpluging the lead every time is an inconvenience.
The reason my dad uses the amp isn't only for the surround system but late at night he puts the tv on mute and uses wireless headphones so not to disturb my mum when she's in bed.
The main problem is that the majority of programmes aren't transmitted in high definition and bigger tv's can't cope with the upscale of picture and become blocky, fuzzy or jagged.
The block, jagged problems you describe are not usually caused by the upscaling but by the high compression used on many/most SD digital transmissions. In short you see them because the TV is larger not because it's LCD or plasma and you see them on a large enough CRT as well.
The block, jagged problems you describe are not usually caused by the upscaling but by the high compression used on many/most SD digital transmissions. In short you see them because the TV is larger not because it's LCD or plasma and you see them on a large enough CRT as well.
Well if that really was the case then how come my dad has a projector in his pub which can show video as big as 2 meters wide which comes off his regular freeview box yet even up close it shows no sign of pixelation or blockyness.
He's recently tried out 2 led tv's and the Sony bravia was far worse, blocky and pixelated than the Samsung which seemed to deal with sd pictures a lot better yet the samsung claimed to be 100hz and the sony 200hz and both were the same size. Just goes to show that refresh rate isn't the be all and end all.
My Sony CRT lasted over 20 years before it expired. I'm currently using a small Sharp CRT - about 8 years old and beginning to have some problems. So I'm looking at replacements. Is it true that the viewing angle is not as good on LCDs? The kitchen area is at one end of the lounge and at the moment I can watch TV while cooking dinner :rolleyes:
the samsung claimed to be 100hz and the sony 200hz and both were the same size. Just goes to show that refresh rate isn't the be all and end all.
Of course it isn't, who said that it was? No single technical specification of any TV can tell you the whole story, you have to evaluate the thing as a whole.
My Sony CRT lasted over 20 years before it expired. I'm currently using a small Sharp CRT - about 8 years old and beginning to have some problems. So I'm looking at replacements. Is it true that the viewing angle is not as good on LCDs? The kitchen area is at one end of the lounge and at the moment I can watch TV while cooking dinner :rolleyes:
Lcd isn't just one tech no matter how its simplified by marketing, panels such as ips tech lcd have wide viewing angles, not as wide as crt or plasma though. A cheap lcd may have pretty horrible viewing angles though.
Well if that really was the case then how come my dad has a projector in his pub which can show video as big as 2 meters wide which comes off his regular freeview box yet even up close it shows no sign of pixelation or blockyness.
He's recently tried out 2 led tv's and the Sony bravia was far worse, blocky and pixelated than the Samsung which seemed to deal with sd pictures a lot better yet the samsung claimed to be 100hz and the sony 200hz and both were the same size. Just goes to show that refresh rate isn't the be all and end all.
Refresh rate has nothing to do with scaling a SD image.
Things like just flashing the backlight can double the hz rating, it is as you've seen a misleading number.
SED tv is the future. It's a fair compromise between the thinness and style of an led tv but with the performance and vibrance you'd expect from a crt. They don't suffer latency issues so no need to worry about refresh rate or pixel dimensions etc and they don't process the picture as it's drawn in the same way a crt draws the image.
Unfortunately the company who owns the rights to the technology (Nanotech) is not the same as the company who purchased the rights to build them (Canon) and because Canon didn't have the facilities to build them themselves they entered in a joint venture with Toshiba which resulted in a legal battle between Canon and Nanotech who sued them for breach of contract. So now we have a situation where we've got this ground breaking piece of technology that nobody can make as neither the manufacturer nor the company who owns the rights to the technology will jointly agree to allow someone else to make them. They are still making them for commercial use like tv industry or hospital equipment etc but they will never be available for the home market. After the legal battle Canon decided to give up on the idea so now it looks as though they will never hit the shops unless somebody has a change of heart.
I miss the sound i got from my Sony kdl52ws. It was a pro-logic tv with a booming bass. The sound from most if not all slim tv's is pants but that's to be expected so I now use a home cinema for sound while i'm watching
Well if that really was the case then how come my dad has a projector in his pub which can show video as big as 2 meters wide which comes off his regular freeview box yet even up close it shows no sign of pixelation or blockyness.
The way you can prove it is to choose something on Sky which is both HD and SD. If you watch via SCART the HD version will usually be much better than the SD version. This shows it's the transmission not the TV. If you don't have Sky then you could watch a DVD and if that is okay again that points to the transmission.
He's recently tried out 2 led tv's and the Sony bravia was far worse, blocky and pixelated than the Samsung which seemed to deal with sd pictures a lot better yet the samsung claimed to be 100hz and the sony 200hz and both were the same size. Just goes to show that refresh rate isn't the be all and end all.
It sounds like there is some extra image processing switched on for the Sony, this often makes the picture worse. Refresh rate isn't very important but usually Sonys are better than Samsungs.
With SD pictures & sound not that good on LCD/LED televisions, I wonder if anyone regrets getting rid of their old CRT television, excluding the space factor?
no.
Overall i have a better picture now (SD) and can also have HD too (not poss with the CRT).
I will try to make a list.....
The LCD has a higher res (sharper image) even for SD. Ticker tapes on things like News channels are now pin sharp just like being connected to a PC.
The colours are better than before (no slight smudgyness where 2 colours meet, eg red bleed).
No more tilted pictures on letter box content.
Black and white can be reproduced in films (rather than dark grey for black or cream for white) if i use the Theatre function, thus matching CRT in this respect.
SD over HDMI (not poss with CRT) is much better than with Scart.
Acts just like a PC LCD monitor when hooked up to the PC on hdmi. Works really well and fully automated. S-Video on my old CRT sort of worked for this, but the quality was nowhere near as good, and the setting up was very crude compared with now.
Generates a lot less heat.
Uses a lot less power.
Takes up less space.
Can be picked up and moved without breaking your back in the process.
Downsides.
Higher res image shows up more imperfections in the SD image. Helped by using satellite rather than freeview, and not a problem on HD content (and rarely on DVD).
Viewing angle while quite good left to right is still quite poor top to bottom.
Sound is average - not bad, quite a few options for getting the most out of the tiny in built speakers, but there is a limit to what the software can do due to those small thin speakers. This will only get worse as we see OLED screens in the future which will be no deeper than a bit of cardboard.
This set (quite "old" now) only has a single HDMI port - using a remote control HDMI hub to solve the problem but multiple sockets on the set would be much better.
Comments
However, since our DSO last month, the addition of a £60 Freeview HD box (with USB recording and DD5.1 transcoding) has transformed the situation - probably the largest TV step-change since colour IMO.
OK only 4 channels on terrestrial (just like TV of old) but everything becomes so much more watchable, the LCD is much happier with this kind of input. So please don't disregard broadcast HD.
If it was smaller than a 32, then presumably it was a 28? - it's best lifted with two people, but they really aren't that heavy - I've carried them upstairs on my own occasionally.
It's the 36 inch ones that are heavy, with some at 120kg :eek:
They used to say 'four man lift' on the box, but you can';t get four people round it and carry it through a doorway
Your right of course...but the sound system has changed the whole viewing experience.
What ever happended to the good old HD CRT Link here
HD CRT sets were absolutely crap, only low resolution, with poor pictures - very few manufacturers ever bothered in the UK, and soon dropped them. The only ones I've seen have come in as scrap, as people replace them with vastly superior LCD sets.
Cheers,
David.
There was one good one in the states, the sony fine pitch was the only one that even approached full HD. The rest were junk which only actually were able to render ED resolution even if they could technically call themselves HD simply because of the beam line scan count regardless of the result.
During the SD era the high end computer monitors only got to around 1600x1200 which is close but the wrong aspect ratio. Not that it mattered since there was no HD video to use on them let alone the power to render it.
Same on monitors, brightness is limited - but at least monitors usually have better geometry and convergence.
To me the 'listening experience has always been as important as the 'viewing' experience, so I totally understand what you mean.
Grundig did some HUGE 4:3 sets - might have been 38 inch?, something like that.
They came with two bolt on carrying bars - and if the customer had lost them we wouldn't consider trying to move the set.
Sorry to bump an old thread but I came across this while trying to look for an answer to a problem that my dad is having with his new 40" Samsung led tv.
Doesn't sitting further away completely defeat the entire object of having a bigger tv? If that's the care them why not just pay less and get a smaller tv? The whole point of having a bigger tv is so people can enjoy a home cinema experience but what's the point if the majority of stuff is unwatchable?
My dad has tried 2 different smart tv's now and has decided to go back to his old crt.
The main problem is that the majority of programmes aren't transmitted in high definition and bigger tv's can't cope with the upscale of picture and become blocky, fuzzy or jagged.
Another problem he suffered was audio lag. Lcd's need more picture processing so the audio output from his pvr to his surround system is ahead of the picture on the tv making it out of sync. This is ok for watching live tv through the internal speakers but when put through an amp the audio is processed quicker than the picture from the tv. This doesn't happen with crt because the picture isn't processed the same. The only way around this that i've managed to find is to buy an AV amplifier with an audio delay function. On standard definition the picture looks inferior to his old crt and the sound from the internal speakers is far better quality than the tinny sound from his lcd.
The samsung was far better than the Sony Bravia that he also tried which I was surprised as I thought the Sony would have been a lot better. Watching the snooker last night was just awful. The outlines of the balls looked jagged and fuzzy and there's no HD channel for BBC2. The Samsung was a lot better for picture but still suffered with problems with audio. I played around with the hundreds of settings to no avail. That's another thing, the new tv's seem to be ridiculously complicated even for a nerd like myself, setting up the tv is a total nightmare with far too many options for adjusting picture and sound. It all gets a bit too much and the menus are a total minefield with settings such as noise filter, edge enhancement, black control and all the different colour modes, presets and audio options.
He's taking it back today and staying with his old crt until technology gets better. The only way I can see this improving is if they bring out SED tv but due the the legal battles going on I can't see that happening.
I'm dreading the day my widescreen crt packs up because I don't think i'll be able to find anything near as good and if I end up having to buy a new amplifier just to correct a sound lag issue it's gonna cost me a fortune for something which in my opinion is inferior technology.
I don't have a blueray player and don't intend to as most of my dvd's are standard def or old vhs good movie backups. I'm not really bothered about high definition. I just want a good quality led tv that can show a good quality sd picture. Unfortunately I don't think such a thing truly exists.
Your sound issue is because you're not connecting it correctly, you shouldn't take the audio from the back of your PVR. What you should do is take the optical audio from the back of the TV, this 'should' be in sync with the picture.
But possibly your old amp doesn't have optical inputs?.
As for picture, sounds like he's viewing from too close for SD?.
I don't have an optical input on the amp but I did try taking the audio out by pluging a scart to phono adapter into the tv's scart socket but all I got was the audio coming from the tv tuner and not the audio from the Humax box so the audio didn't correspond to the channel I was watching on the pvr. I don't know if the optical out works the same or not but wasn't prepared to go out and spend another £50 buying an optical lead and converter just to find out.
The only other option was to plug it into the tv's headphone socket but that cuts the audio to the tv and we don't always want to use the amp so going round the back and pluging and unpluging the lead every time is an inconvenience.
The reason my dad uses the amp isn't only for the surround system but late at night he puts the tv on mute and uses wireless headphones so not to disturb my mum when she's in bed.
The block, jagged problems you describe are not usually caused by the upscaling but by the high compression used on many/most SD digital transmissions. In short you see them because the TV is larger not because it's LCD or plasma and you see them on a large enough CRT as well.
Well if that really was the case then how come my dad has a projector in his pub which can show video as big as 2 meters wide which comes off his regular freeview box yet even up close it shows no sign of pixelation or blockyness.
He's recently tried out 2 led tv's and the Sony bravia was far worse, blocky and pixelated than the Samsung which seemed to deal with sd pictures a lot better yet the samsung claimed to be 100hz and the sony 200hz and both were the same size. Just goes to show that refresh rate isn't the be all and end all.
Same as anything really.
Lcd isn't just one tech no matter how its simplified by marketing, panels such as ips tech lcd have wide viewing angles, not as wide as crt or plasma though. A cheap lcd may have pretty horrible viewing angles though.
Refresh rate has nothing to do with scaling a SD image.
Things like just flashing the backlight can double the hz rating, it is as you've seen a misleading number.
Unfortunately the company who owns the rights to the technology (Nanotech) is not the same as the company who purchased the rights to build them (Canon) and because Canon didn't have the facilities to build them themselves they entered in a joint venture with Toshiba which resulted in a legal battle between Canon and Nanotech who sued them for breach of contract. So now we have a situation where we've got this ground breaking piece of technology that nobody can make as neither the manufacturer nor the company who owns the rights to the technology will jointly agree to allow someone else to make them. They are still making them for commercial use like tv industry or hospital equipment etc but they will never be available for the home market. After the legal battle Canon decided to give up on the idea so now it looks as though they will never hit the shops unless somebody has a change of heart.
The way you can prove it is to choose something on Sky which is both HD and SD. If you watch via SCART the HD version will usually be much better than the SD version. This shows it's the transmission not the TV. If you don't have Sky then you could watch a DVD and if that is okay again that points to the transmission.
It sounds like there is some extra image processing switched on for the Sony, this often makes the picture worse. Refresh rate isn't very important but usually Sonys are better than Samsungs.
no.
Overall i have a better picture now (SD) and can also have HD too (not poss with the CRT).
I will try to make a list.....
The LCD has a higher res (sharper image) even for SD. Ticker tapes on things like News channels are now pin sharp just like being connected to a PC.
The colours are better than before (no slight smudgyness where 2 colours meet, eg red bleed).
No more tilted pictures on letter box content.
Black and white can be reproduced in films (rather than dark grey for black or cream for white) if i use the Theatre function, thus matching CRT in this respect.
SD over HDMI (not poss with CRT) is much better than with Scart.
Acts just like a PC LCD monitor when hooked up to the PC on hdmi. Works really well and fully automated. S-Video on my old CRT sort of worked for this, but the quality was nowhere near as good, and the setting up was very crude compared with now.
Generates a lot less heat.
Uses a lot less power.
Takes up less space.
Can be picked up and moved without breaking your back in the process.
Downsides.
Higher res image shows up more imperfections in the SD image. Helped by using satellite rather than freeview, and not a problem on HD content (and rarely on DVD).
Viewing angle while quite good left to right is still quite poor top to bottom.
Sound is average - not bad, quite a few options for getting the most out of the tiny in built speakers, but there is a limit to what the software can do due to those small thin speakers. This will only get worse as we see OLED screens in the future which will be no deeper than a bit of cardboard.
This set (quite "old" now) only has a single HDMI port - using a remote control HDMI hub to solve the problem but multiple sockets on the set would be much better.