This is very true, I have a 6 year old 50hz WS Philips and the picture is excellent, my friend had his two Philips TVs (28" 4:3 & 36" WS) set with digital processing switched on for Sky & freeview, and it was like watching a strobe effect, I told him to switch them off and he was surprised how much better the picture was.

It is such a shame Philips doesn't mention this in the manual (well I don't think it does) as their picture tubes I think are brilliant, I have yet to find a TV with such a good crisp vibrant display as the Philips I have.

Just gave my sister my seven year old 29" phiilip, fantastic picture through sky and with the mahogany cabinet. Sad to see it go.

One thing to remember about plasma screens is that they have a very short lifespan, 3 to 4 years max.

They just burn out and can't be viably repaired.

IMO spending £3000 + every 3 years is just crazy.

LCD screens don't suffer this problem and should last much longer.

So you intend to watch TV 24 hours a day then?

A modern plasma has a lifespan of well over 30,000 hours use and that is only the duration of the panels brightness/contrast halflife, it will still be perfectly useable long after that barring breakdowns of course.

off topic slightly but do games console light gun games work on plasma and LCD screen?

pioneer test their plasmas to 30 000 hours and the new panasonic plasmas are tested to 60 000 hours.if you want some perspective on that,at 7 hours a day every day it will take about twelve years to get to 30 000 hours

For HDTV here in America and all the many TVs I have seen displaying it the best quality for smaller screens easily goes to CRT and for larger screens easily Plasma. LCDs are lousy in comparison to the two, in my opinion. As is typical projection, which is by far the worse. The reason being the matching of resolutions.

As with a computer LCD if the HDTV LCD is not viewed at its native resolution it simply goes soft. When 1920x1080 (highest HDTVresolution) resolutions become common and quality improves the potential is very high for LCDs to look outstanding for 1080i shows. The problem is what happens with the 720P content? They could be shown at actual resolution but will not fill the screen (ideal, but many people will not like the look) or if they are made to fill the screen the resolution will once again look terribly soft.

Plasma doesn't suffer from this from what I can see. The best Plasmas offer the most visual wow factor of all HDTVs when you take into account size. The best one I have seen so far comes from Sony. The same for CRT.

As with all types of TVs quality varies from manufacturer to manufacturer and model to model, and of course price.

The way things are now I would not buy an LCD for TV use.

Yeah and they need to be re-gassed every year, dont work for currys do you?

i never understood their technique for selling plasmas worth a few thousand,i.e. yeah if you buy this it needs regassing and will only last for 3-4 years ,sounds like a sure fire way to aim the customer towards the £500 telly

CRT is definately the best thing for now while we are still in the Standard Definition TV era. Watching most broadcasts on a plasma where the picture is stretched to cover the higher pixel rate of screen and the broadcast bandwidth (compression) is so visible, watching, SDTV on a plasma at the moment is quite disappointing.

Plasma in 2 years once HDTV starts broadcasting and the difference will be so noticeable, and since larger tv's are become the trend, CRT's will become dead as they simply take too much room. The quality will be brilliant then, every pixel will be covered and compression will hardly be noticeable on screen. As for the person earlier who said don't bother with plasma get HDTV, well HDTV is a picture format and you'll find most plasma's are actually already prepared for this, unlike most of the current CRT's around at the moment.

I think plasma gives generally a more natural picture colour, which at first i hated after having a smaller CRT for so many years but after a while you get used to the different type of projection. The only other fault i see really is when watching football if you look at the grass as soon as the camera moves the focus goes out a bit but that could be due to camera, broadcast, but overall isn't that annoying anyways. I think plasma's will become even better, i think 1024 x 1024 resolutions will become the standard for HDTV, which leaves me a bit pissed off getting an 852 x 480 at the time, but as long as every pixels covered (which it isnt in SDTV at the moment) ill be happy!

hdtv is already available,even if it is a bit limited

hdtv

See http://www.astra.lu/press-info/news/...20040621.shtml .

A standard of 1080i25 and 720p50 has been chosen for Europe, with a minimun of 720 vertical resolution. It appears that 1280 x 720 is a standard for 720p

1080i usually has a vertical resolution of up to 1920.

Euro1080 uses 1920 x 1080 also.

Further reading: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2004/08/13/european_hdtv/
Last edited by BexTech : 15-08-2004 at 19:26

In my manual using either the VGA or Component i can recieve 480i, 480p, 576i, 576p, 1080i, so since it says i should be able to view it!

being able to view it and being able to view it in it's full resolution are not the same thing.

As digi al says your plasma can accept those resolutions but can only display 852*480, the internal scaler will be adjusting the input to match the screen resolution, results will be variable.
You should benefit from having a superior digital source via High Def but that may not be enough to justify paying whatever premium SKY put on those channels.

The low bandwidth of current channels are so clearly visible at the moment on most channels, such as if you got a jpeg image and compressed it about 90% and looked around the objects and the colours. I can accept since the resolution is small on the plasma it may not be worth it, but current TV is over 100pixels short of my plasma which means having HDTV it won't have to be stretched to go full screen but squeezed in which should look a damn lot better anyways.

I hope that 1024 x 1024 ALiS panels do not become standard. The actual resolution is 1024 x 512 interlaced, not much more than than your existing progressive model's resolution. In addition, to avoid vertical scaling ALiS panels crop 1080i material to 1024i, so you do not get to see the whole picture. Frankly, a CRT HDTV is a better buy than an ALiS panel.

I think at the end of the day there isn't much to worry about, as long as the compression in broadcasting goes down and there are more pixels on the broadcast or equal amount to your display, your gonna get the best out your screen, and as long as thats there most screens will give a great performance that you'll be pleased with.