New TV's......too many to choose from
- Thread starter jrose609
- Start date
x3 I have the rather old now P50U50. Blows ANY 4x priced LED out of the water. Its very difficult to find problems with the image. Attach it to something network capable and you have "smart". I think I paid $600 for it.
IMO, it does not really matter about what you are playing. A good plasma is just flat out better than a comparably sized and priced LED. Contrast and black levels are better and I am relatively certain that that is measurable.
Local dimming will help on an LED and the full array will bring it even closer to plasma.l Watch out if you look for full array. The term is used for a variety of LED lighting systems including direct lit. For a new LED TV with full-array local dimming I think you are talking > $6000.
IMO, it does not really matter about what you are playing. A good plasma is just flat out better than a comparably sized and priced LED. Contrast and black levels are better and I am relatively certain that that is measurable.
Local dimming will help on an LED and the full array will bring it even closer to plasma.l Watch out if you look for full array. The term is used for a variety of LED lighting systems including direct lit. For a new LED TV with full-array local dimming I think you are talking > $6000.
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I too have a Panasonic Plasma 50'' (P50UT50) and we love it…. plus it was under $800 two years ago. Out of the box the picture is crappy but once it's calibrated it looks great. Like most it is very glarey in a bright room. The Smart tv stuff is fine… mostly Netflix & Amazon Prime.
I'm pretty happy with my Toshiba 55".
Bought a floor display so I got a deep discount and no box to throw away. No smart features here either, I wanted a good picture, not net access.
Bought a floor display so I got a deep discount and no box to throw away. No smart features here either, I wanted a good picture, not net access.
Before I got my TiVo Roamio boxes, I used my Sony Blu Ray player as my streaming device. It's funny how a cheap blu Ray player works better for streaming than the expensive Sony tv that it's connected to.
The other thing that's nice about the blu Ray player is that I can play ripped DVDs that I store on a NAS. I used to use Apple TV to play ripped DVDs, but that's kind of a cluster. You have to have iTunes running on your computer and for whatever reason, I can't rip a dvd anymore and have iTunes recognize it. I don't even use iTunes for movies anymore.
I bought a 70" vizio 4k at one of those week of thanksgiving or cyber Monday sales. At first I was a little hesitant because in the past picture quality reviews were always won by Samsung and Sony. But after reading some reviews and being swayed by the super low price I went with the less high-end brand. I'm very well pleased. Picture quality is amazing. And since 4k is an even multiplier of 720p and 1080p, everything looks great on it, even old content. Don't even think about getting an "up-convert" blu-ray player. I cannot imagine what it even does, since all of the pixels fit evenly into 4k. I'll be thrilled at the end of the year when actual 4k blurays are released. Current content is very limited. There are just a few shows on Netflix and amazon, assuming that not too many other people in your neighborhood are sucking up your bandwidth.
My previous TV was a sony, from WAY before the days of smart tv. I tried to stick with sony devices since it reduced the number of remotes I had to use (and kept me from having to get a harmony remote or something.) I had an old "fat" PS3 and it was great at streaming video and that kind of thing. After 4 years or so, it burned up, and since I'm not much of a gamer, If figured it would be cheaper to get a "smart" bluray player, so I got a pretty fancy Sony player. While it DID connect to pretty much everything that the PS3 did as far as streaming goes, it was clunky and slow, and not as full featured as the PS3, in comparison. I eventually had a buddy pick up a ultra-slim PS3 for me at an "associates only" outlet store of a large retailer for $150 or so, and I've been happy ever since.
So, my wife decided we would get a Vizio 70" 4K from Costco. Brought it home yesterday and hooked it up. Very easy to set up. Jafir is right. The picture is amazing. Even the uncalibrated picture is great out of the box. I connected to wi-fi and watched the first couple House of Cards episodes for season 3. All I can say is......holy crap. The 4K picture on Netflix is amazing.
We haven't tried anything else but the news, but so far we are happy. Guess time will tell.
Ahhh... not quite. Pixels are not merely duplicated when it is upscaling. The resolution of the source data being a multiple of you device, also doesn't matter other than more pixels is better... period.
Your TV is upscaling if you play anything but 4k that matches your screen. In a worst case, when upscaling the device is using a linear interpolation to get pixels "between" the original source content. However, linear interpolation is trivial these days and is not used... any dork could do this calculation.
There are many interpolation algorithms and just as many filters that are applied to the picture to produce a higher resolution image on the 4k device, given lessor source data.
These processes are as good as the engineers and time put into them and IMO, in the consumer market no one beats sony TV's on the motion and upscaling processes. However, I will say that the Samsung 4k that I used did a good job.
Good upscaling will also reduce many aliasing artifacts that you see on systems, especially computer games. Some of these processes will result in game latency and also in audio/video sync issues. Most sets will have compensation for audio sync.
There are also some very fine devices out there that specialize in upscaling and these are even better than any TV. In fact that are some that would cost even more than a consumer tv. If the processes on the device and tv complement each other, having both can be better and this is more than likely the case, but I think it is possible to see some artifacts of this... just have never tried to analyze or measure it.
EDIT: And of course if you really care you need to know how the content provider and device compress and decompress the audio and video. I can't help you there, no need for me to learn this yet, but likely will have too soon.
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I'll take your word for it. The last thing I need is a video game system on a 55" tv to tempt me. I'm not getting an Xbox or Playstation.
Lets say you have 16x16 pixel output device and input 8x8 pixels or 10x10 pixels.
Assuming also that you have a decent upscaler process.
Which input would produce a better output?
Maybe you could also give me and example resolution input to an ultra hd device that would prove your point.
You don't need as much processing if you have whole number multiples. The reason that Sony got such a good reputation for picture quality when HDTVs first came around is because most content at the time was 480i at the best, and it looked like crap trying to make if fit 720 pixels, so Sony's software did the best job of upscaling. But even the cheapest HDTVs looked great when fed a signal that matched the resolution. Another problem from the old days was that film content is 24 frames per second and NTSC is 30 (or actually 60 interlaced), so to make the video match the time, they had to do use 3-2 pull down. It looks ok on an old, low resolution, interlaced CRT, but again looked like crap on a progressive display, like an HDTV. Sony's image processing helped out here too, doing de-combing or whatever other tricks to help the de-interlaced images.
So the less processing you have to do to the image, the better it will look. So the more evenly divisible the resolution is by the source, the better the image will look, even on cheap upscalers.
I did answer your question, the evenly divisible. But don't bother to try and educate me. Something this obvious doesn't need any more back and forth unless you have something profound that overrules common sense.