Ultimate 16:9 monitor for PDX10

[Tommy Haupfear]

Ok, this is overkill but today at Circuit City I ran across the new Sony KDF-70XBR950 70" LCD HDTV. I was blown away by how large it was but only weighed a hair over 200lb.

The great part is that it has a total of three firewire ports for hooking up your camcorder!

I'm tempted to take some PDX10 footage by and run a straight IEEE1394 feed.

Too bad the set is $7000 USD

http://www.crutchfield.com/cgi-bin/S...o&i=15870XB950

[Julian Luttrell]

Just how good is the image on these huge tvs (this model or in general)?

According to my maths, a 70 inch 16:9 screen will have 12 pixels to the inch horizontally which surely will look ghastly?

Regards,

Julian

[Tommy Haupfear]

I'm not sure about your math but I do know that both the 70" and my 50" Sony LCD HD set have three LCD panels each with over a million pixels capable of a native 1386 x 788.

In fact all feeds are upconverted to 788p with no signal degradation and my PDX10 and DV953 footage looks substantially better than it ever did on a CRT based TV (not including computer monitors).

Of course a HD cam would look even better but these newer TVs help SD source material look its best.

[Boyd Ostroff]

According to the description it's a "rear projection LCD", so I assume this is really an LCD projector inside a box with a rear screen? Maybe better to just get a standalone projector if that's what you're looking for? Have you seen the current issue of DV magazine? They give a rave review to the Epson Powerlite TW100 which they call "almost perfect". And it's "only" $4,500 ;-)

But to get down out of the stratosphere here, I'm using a Sony SDM-V72W 17" 1280x768 16:9 LCD monitor that I really like. This might be your best bang for the buck, I recently saw J&R advertising them for $550 I think. It takes VGA, s-video and component so it will double as a computer monitor if desired. The s-video looks pretty good once you tweak the controls (start by turning down the sharpness all the way).

But it really shines when you feed it 480p component video. I am working with some footage that I've run through a deinterlacer, and sending it via firewire to a Sony RDR-GX7 DVD recorder which transcodes to 480p. The monitor is connected to the DVD recorder via component video. It really shows off the PDX-10 at its best. In fact, this has me lusting after one of the larger Sony direct view LCD screens, but they're SO expensive...

But there seems to be hope if we can hold out a little longer... there was an interesting article in the last issue of Fortune Magazine "The Race to Make the World Flat" that discussed new manufacturing techniques for large LCD panels. It predicted they would replace plasma as the preferred form of large screen TV's in the next few years.

Today the price gap is dramatic: Samsung charges $9,000 for a 40-inch LCD, while plasma costs less than half that. If those prices paralyze you, you may feel more acquisitive in 2006. That's when Charles Annis, director of flat-panel equipment research at DisplaySearch, sees LCD and plasma-screen prices reaching parity—and when a 30-inch flat panel set should drop to $1,000, and 42-inch screens will sell for about $2,000.

The fact that LCDs are even being considered as boob-tube killers is astounding to people who follow the industry. Manufacturers less than a decade ago were still struggling to get good at making LCDs big enough for laptops. They've succeeded so well that something like 38 million LCDs are going into notebooks worldwide this year, and another 53 million into desktop PCs, where flat screens are replacing bulky CRTs at a rapid rate. Now, fueled by U.S. innovations, the vast Asian manufacturing industry that has grown up to make LCDs is perfecting production methods that should soon put big LCD TVs into millions of homes

[Julian Luttrell]

My maths is based on a 720 pixel wide SD TV frame. Stretch that over 70" diagonal 16:9 and you get 12 _original_ pixels per inch.

As you say, the TV upconverts an SD source to create a 1080 image. But how it does this with no signal degradation surprises me.

Working with PAL figures for now: 1080 (HD) lines is not a multiple of 576 (SD) lines, so somewhere in the frame there will be a range of lines that never exactly correspond to an original source line. These lines have to be interpolated from the SD source by guessing what _might_ have appeared between the original lines, but was not recorded on tape/disc because the original source threw that information away.

Result: signal degradation.

Isn't what you are reporting as a better image simply a result of increased contrast ratio, more accurate colour rendition and fewer signal reflections/interferences in the signal path (analogue component), resulting in a perception of crispness and clarity?

Sorry to be technical, but, IMHO, this bigger=better story is a myth. What is better is: digital signal paths, improved colour fidelity, and reduced cross talk and interference. Look at both a 720x576 PAL SD LCD and a big LCD set up further away so they look the same size to the viewer, and the SD display will be crisper to the eye.

Regards,

Julian

[John Jay]

have they solved the burn in problems with station ID yet?

a friend had a Pioneer five footer which had the burn in rectangle of National Geographic - it had to go!

[Tommy Haupfear]

As you say, the TV upconverts an SD source to create a 1080 image. But how it does this with no signal degradation surprises me.

Line doubling and scaling have come a long way and Sony has really improved over their original proprietary DRC process. The TV is not upconverting everything to 1080i but instead to 788p. 1080i is 1920x540 (interlaced NTSC) while 788p is 1286x788p.

Sorry to be technical, but, IMHO, this bigger=better story is a myth.

Thats would someone would say who has a small one (TV that is).. Just kidding!

I prefer the SD picture resolution (not just quality) of an upconverted signal on my 50" LCD much better than I have on my past 4:3 analog sets.

Quoted from Sony

Enhanced Direct Digital II: The first step in the digital processing chain, Direct Digital II includes an integrated 3D digital comb filter. This new circuit improves the video signal-to-noise ratio by reducing the number of digital-to-analog conversions.

Digital Reality Creation™ MultiFunction V1: Upconverts NTSC (analog) signals to near-HD quality. This latest version of DRC lets you adjust the amount of enhancement based on the quality of the input signal, so you'll see clear, stable images no matter what the video source.

Multi-Image Driver (MID™ X): Specially designed for "fixed-pixel" TVs, MID X's primary job is to scale (convert) all incoming signals to match the display's 1386 x 788-pixel resolution without degrading signal quality.

[Tommy Haupfear]

have they solved the burn in problems with station ID yet?

Your friend's TV is most likely a phosphor based rear projection CRT which is prone to burn-in. With DLP and LCD rear projection its all but eliminated and video gaming is encouraged.

There is also no misconvergence assoicated with LCD and DLP technology. Those older CRT rear projections sets can have their alignment to drift over time or with any sudden movement causing a ghost like outline. Some newer CRT RPTVs have autofocus CRTs but still in comparison to fixed pixel displays.

[Julian Luttrell]

Tommy,

yes line doubling and other rescaling algorithms have improved over the years, but there's no avoiding the fact that these techniques are _inventing_ information/pixels where previously there was none.

What you are seeing is a high quality smudge. You are not seeing original HD footage. I am not saying that you, or anyone else for that matter, are not seeing a marked improvement in your viewing. What I am saying is that this is due to reasons _other_ than size.


Regards,

Julian

BTW - 1080i is NOT 1920 x 540!! It is 1920 wide by 1080 high, with half of the lines drawn every 50th of a second, the other half drawn 1 50th later (PAL). The "i" or "p" does not relate to spatial resolution, but to temporal frequency.

[Tommy Haupfear]

BTW - 1080i is NOT 1920 x 540!! It is 1920 wide by 1080

Sorry I was giving out my HTPC settings as most LCD sets do not handle interlaced. 1920x1080 is converted to 1920x540 and then back to the native resolution of the particular fixed pixel set. Resolution is lost in this process but it would but is easily comparable to CRTs with their limitations.

[Don Berube]

Boyd,

Thank you for the tip on the Sony SDM-V72W. This looks like it may be just what I need for one of my viewing stations.

I'm also still torn over which monitor to buy for my home tv room. I currently use a Sony PVM-2530 but I am looking to upgrade to HDTV. It's going to be hard for me to let go of that 2530 though, it has such a sweet image.

Anybody have any suggestions for a 27-32" size 16:9 720P-native monitor?

Also am looking for any suggestions for a 27-32" size 16:9 1080i-native screen.

Any suggestions will be greatly appreciated.

- don

[Agus Casse]

I dont trust LCD screens cause they often have bad pixels.. and you cant change them... after a while like and more after some years those burned pixels seens to start to reproduce.

[Boyd Ostroff]

Well Agus all I can say is that you're missing out on some nice screens. I suppose you also won't buy a laptop computer for the same reason? Yes, there are often a couple bad pixels. My Sony that I mentioned above does have one constantly blue pixel. I have never noticed them "reproduce" personally though. My 21" Trinitron CRT screen has two narrow black horizontal lines which are the shadow of a little support wire. Are these also unacceptable? It's true that you can fixate on this sort of thing sometimes, but most of the time it really isn't much of a problem because you're looking at the overall picture, not some miniscule flaw in the display itself.

The prices and specs on LCD's are improving rapidly and new manufacturing techniques are producing better quality. An article I read recently predicted that a 32" HD LCD screen would sell for around $1,000 within 3 years while a 40" should cost $2000. If you need a reminder of the advantages of LCD screens, try moving to a new house like I did last year and lugging a 27" WEGA CRT set and a 21" Trinitron computer monitor! ;-)

[Tommy Haupfear]

try moving to a new house like I did last year and lugging a 27" WEGA CRT set and a 21" Trinitron computer monitor!

No joke! I traded in the 19" Sony CRT and 34" Wega CRT for a slim 17" LCD and my 50" Sony LCD RPTV weighs just 73 lbs!

My back is very grateful.