Muchachos

I have seen HDTV, and it is stunning. I am aware that Sky will start HD broadcasts early next year and I'm aiming to get an HDTV.

Any pointers - brands, costs, opinions? I gather that CRT is not an option in the UK.

Regards

Mike

If you want 42" Plasma then the Pioneer 435 or the up and coming Panasonic TH42PV500. I don't think there are any other certified HD Ready plasmas yet. I'm sure some say they'll do it, but actual badged ones are few at the moment, although I'm sure that will change in the up and coming months.

Related to this, does anyone definitively know if there will be a minimum screen size for HD, and if so, what it will be? I have heard rumours that it is 26"??

Neil

quote:

I gather that CRT is not an option in the UK.

Why not? no one selling them? I've got a 30" toshiba HD CRT here in Canada and I've had it for approx 1 year.

quote:

I don't think there are any other certified HD Ready plasmas yet.

I'm not sure thay you really need "HD Ready". I'm assuming that with sky (as with my cable company here) that you will get a HD box that will have HD output (either component, DVI or both) and your tv just has to have HD input, not necassarily be "HDTV Ready".

quote:

I have seen HDTV, and it is stunning

The HD here is good, but I wouldn't say stunning. The quality of the other channels here is very poor, I thought that the quality of BBC over a terrestrial signal was better than the digital quality here. The HD is way better than the other tv here, but I still think below DVD standards.

I think that the TV manufacturers have decided that it will not be economical to produce PAL HD CRT sets. Not when they anticipate a massive movement towards LCD/Plasma.
The Hitachi 42PD7200 plasma is HD able and getting some favourable reviews. In addition, a whole raft of HD able LCD panels are about to come out - mostly at lower prices than the outgoing non-HD models and promising better performance to boot!

I have one answer after seeing it yesterday in the Panasonic shop @ Cheltenham. The Panasonic TH42PV500 is the muts nuts plasma TV. I saw it with HD source and with SD dvd and it is amazing. I have not had a chance to see it with standard sky yet, but I think I will be getting one very soon.

It would be a shame if they didn't do it with crt since, so far, none of the flat-screen technologies can tough crt in terms of picture quality.


regards,

Tam

In response to myself saying the HDTV I'd seen so far in Canada hadn't been too good, I'm not sure if they have improved bandwidth or my new projector is better than my CRT HD TV set or the upgrade in cables to the projector for HD cable box, but the pic quality on a few proper HD shows have been stunning and probably better than DVD. My only reservation is that so far I have only seen a few TV shows (24 and Prisonbreak) and not any films.

JVC make a couple of high-def compatible CRT TVs, and Samsung have a model too. But neither confirms fully to the high-def standards in terms of resolution and neither has an HDMI input.

quote:

Originally posted by Tam:
It would be a shame if they didn't do it with crt since, so far, none of the flat-screen technologies can tough crt in terms of picture quality.


regards,

Tam

I thought that until I got my Pioneer 434 plasma. Both my wife and myself feel the picture is better than the Panasonic 362 screen it replaced.

Andy

I've downloaded a few of the microsoft 1080i samples and played them on my HTPC. The difference between this and straight DVD is night and day through my Sony HS10. I'm not sure I quite understand why it's so obvious given that the HS10 has only got 700 odd vertical lines so there's lots of info on the 1080i stuff that isn't even shown - I guess source first and all that.

One query for you HT people who understand HDMI. When I first got my HS10 I just connected it up to my DVD player using the standard S-vhs connection. The picture was fine, but not that great, not much detail, smearing on movement etc. I then got a DVI cable and connected it up to a reasonable spec pc. simply outputting 1024 x 700-ish and using the HS10 to scale internally was ok and definitely better than the s-vhs connection. However what made a really big difference was when I got powerstrip on my pc. This took me ages to fathom, but after much surfing and experimentation I managed to set up the pc to output exactly the same resolution as the lcd panel in the HS10 and at the correct refresh rate. This got me what it called one-to-one pixel mapping. So the pc does both the decoding of the DVD mpeg stream and also scales it precisely to the projector. This made a massive difference to the picture quality.

Will the HDMI outputs in either the forthcoming sky HDTV box, or the DVI outs in the DVD5 do the same thing. I'm conscius that the various panels in projectors are often very diferent resolutions, and unless the box can output exactly the right resolution, there's a big potential shortfall in quality in leaving the projector to scale.

Phil

1-2-1 pixel matching is a bit like setting a PC LCD screen to it's native resolution after watching it in another mode. If you have for example 17" LCD PC screen whose native resolution is 1280x1024, set it to 1024x768 and see how blured it looks, then set it back to 1280x1024 and it will ping/snap back into a very clear picture!

With a Plasma, it has a native resolution of the screen, but it also has a native resolution that it's processor works at. The best native resolution that your screen should be set at is not necersarily going to be it's actualy number of native pixels.

I used to have a SD Panasonic TH42PW6 plasma, it had 480 lines I think, but when I fed it from my PC or scaler with, I think, a 720 or 768 line picture, it just made everything so much sharper. From my PC HD footage, on my SD screen, looked amazing, also the SD Sky picture, scaled up through my iScan scaler, just jumped out at me.

1-2-1 pixel matching is also about adjusting the H&V size and position so that you have exactly the right number of line and columns so that a 720 line picture is showing 720 lines rather than 719 or 721 lines. This can be done in each direction seperately. Seperately for horizontal and vertical, say H for now, display a H B&W line test pattern. The chances are you will see a moire pattern in the lines, ie some look white, some look black, but some look gray and some look thicker or thiner. Now adjust the H size until all lines look the same. Now do the same on the V, once the size is done, display a test pattern that shows overscan, ie where the edge of the screen should be and centralized the picture, using the H&V move, but do not touch the H&V size. Your screen should now be 1-2-1 pixel mapped and you picture should look laods better.

Thanks for the info. I've tried my projector at plenty of different resolutions but once I discovered powerstrip and some recommended settings I set it to output 1366 x 768 pixels at the HS10's refresh rate for this resolution of 56hz. The leap in quality comared to 1024, 1280 which the hs10 could scale from was not small.

What I'm interested in is whether I'd be able to set up say the sky hdtv box to output exactly this resolution and refresh rate. If not then I wouldn't be able to acheive proper 1-2-1 mapping. In this case I'd guess I'd be better using the component outputs rather than the HDMI plug.

Phil

I would not think you would be able to configure SKY to output anything other than the standard resolutions 720 or 1080 etc. You never know, when it comes out it may, but I doubt it. If you like what powerstrip has done for you on the PC side then you will be amazed with what a scaler will do with DVD & SKY. I think one would be needed anyway to get SKY to match you projector resolution wise and would definately needed to output 56hz.

I think you're probably right. I guess that's where the HD ready badge starts to make sense in that these displays will either be optimised for the standard resolutions or maybe their native resolutions will match.

Using a scaler may be difficult as the otput from the sky box will be copy protected (HDCP or something if I recall).

My iScan HD+ works with HDCP signal no problem. I currently feed a DVD5 via DVI through to it and then on upscaled to my plasma via HMDI. The lower model iScan HD does not. I think the Lumagens can handle HDCP no problem too.