http://www.samsclub.com/shopping/nav...825&pCatg=9666


Yere ya go.

1080p
HDMI
60" Sony SXRD

 

Two words for you, "Green Blob"

 

I guess you been checkin it out alot haven't you???

 

Exactly my point- exactly. But that was a few years ago, and a few generations ago too.

My entire point is that that "info" is completely invalid and non applicable to his current purchase as the modern plasma won't have those problems. You will also find that if you read reviews from people with real experience in testing this stuff, they will even still say that even the best LCDs aren't quite on par with the best plasmas yet. I still can't figure out why the majority of people swear by an inferior technology...

 

ok .. first off .. ONLY buy cables from monoprice.com NO WHERE ELSE. if you still feel the need to waste incredible amounts of money, then just send it to me ..

second .. looks like it is cut and paste time again from an old post. so here goes . (btw, I haven't freshened this up in several months, and I am too tired to do it tonight) .. also .. ignore the part about HD-DVD that is tacked onto the end.


======================

couple of things .. I have a 62" Mitsubushi DLP and love it. the TV was cheaper than a plasma .. but if you roll in the price of the Tv, stand, etc, it was not much cheaper than a plasma .. although you can't beat the 62" picture. .. I also have a 32" Olieva LCD which I have been pleased with for the cheap price I paid for it.

Smaller LCD's are cheaper than smaller plasmas, but Plasma is cheaper in the larger sizes .. screen burn in can be an issue, but if you go with a good, high quality unit, unless you are going to stay in the same channel forever, or play the same static screen game for days or weeks on end, it will not be an issue for you.

As for Plasma .. pay attention to the number of hours to half life .. Most of the high quality Plasma's these days have 40,000 to 60,000 hours to half life ..

@ eight hours a day of viewing time, a 40,000 hour unit is going to last you 13 + years before you notice any loss of brightness .. (half life = time to half brightness)
and Plasma TV’s can NOT be refilled, or recharged. LCD backlights can be replaced, DLP lamp are replaceable, but Plasmas are not refillable.

shop around .. and don't just look at the big box stores .. check out higher end stores, (tweeter, home theater store, etc) and look at complete pricing.. by the time you add up the total costs for everything, you can usually get just as good a deal someplace like that, the quality of service you receive is better, most of the time the sales staff is much better informed, and the delivery personnel are almost always much better.

make sure whatever unit you end up buying gets set up correctly once it gets to your house. a lot of the manufactures ship their units set up "hot" which means they have the brightness and crontrast really cranked up .. while this is needed to make their unit look good sitting next to 30 other tv's it is not necessary in your house and all it will serve to do is shorten the life of your unit and make it run less efficiently, and cost more.



if you plan to connect a computer to the TV at any time (Home Theater PC and/or gaming PC), i'd stick with an LCD TV. besides its virtual immunity to screen burn-in, LCD's currently have much higher native resolutions than plasma does, making them better for reading text, and giving you an advantage in games, since you can fit more of the game on the screen at a time. just be sure that if you get an LCD TV, to get one that supports 1080i/1080p NATIVE resolutions...don't fall for the ones that say that they ACCEPT 1080i/p, because usually those are 720p native resolutions, and just convert the 1080 to a 720 resolution to match the TV's native res.

if you plan to mount it on the wall, DLP is definitely not for you, as it is a rear-projection based technology, meaning the TV will have to be too deep for wall-mounting. otherwise, DLP offers a much better picture than LCD, with much darker blacks.

plasma is arguably the best in terms of picture quality, but it also has its drawbacks (just like every other technology does). in the past, screen burn-in was a huge problem, although current technology has helped make it pretty much a non issue. also, the native resolution is generally much lower than DLP/LCD, and the pixels are not square like the other two, they are rectangular. this is why you will see widescreen plasmas listed with resolutions like 800x600 or 1024x768 (which are 4:3 resolutions) instead of 1280x720 or 1920x1080 (which are 16:9 resolutions). this really doesn't present much of a problem, it just makes it more confusing to compare against other types of TV's. however, one other advantage to plasma is that they currently are available in larger sizes than LCD, although LCD is closing the gap quickly.


another thing to keep an eye out for is whether or not the TV has a built-in HDTV tuner. if it says "HDTV-ready", it usually does not have its own tuner, meaning you will need to use a tuner from some other source, like a satellite or cable box. this also means that you will have to purchase a set-top box in order to be able to tune HDTV channels from an over-the-air HDTV antenna. if it says "HDTV tuner included", that means it has an internal tuner, but you still need to make sure what type of tuner you are getting. if it only says NTSC, it will not tune HDTV channels, only standard resolution. however, if it says it has either NTSC/ATSC or just ATSC, you will be able to tune HDTV channels without any need for an external box.

 

cont'd:
==
personally, i would recommend visiting any local stores that specialize in home theater products to see some demos of the products, don't rely on viewing the picture quality that you see at places like Best Buy or Circuit City. those large retail chains focus on offering as many products as possible, so they usually will not have their TV's connected to a good source signal, like HD DVD player or a high-def satellite system....more often than not, they have it connected to a standard (480i/480p) DVD player, or a regular standard-def cable/satellite source. while this DOES let you see how the TV will handle lower-quality source signals, it does NOT let you see the full capability of the display in all its glory.

once you know exactly what it is you are looking for, feel free to purchase from a large retail chain if you are really concerned about price, but until then, stick with places that show you the "full picture", so to speak, and will give you much better support, if y uend up buying from them.

one final thing to mention, once you do finally decide on a TV, invest a few bucks into a calibration DVD. this will usually get your TV calibrated much better than the way it comes out of the box, giving you much better picture quality. these DVD's are pretty cheap, so it's worth the extra few bucks. also, you can have a tech come visit your house and perform a professional calibration, which will without a doubt get your TV set up to have the best picture quality that it possibly can, given its source input. but this is not for the faint of heart, because it can be pretty costly (as in several hundreds of dollars, and sometimes with separate charges to calibrate each input source).





A little more info on HD DVD




Below is an article by Ryan Triet from Microsoft’s Xbox site that does a pretty good job of explaining HD DVD

Standing alone, in all its glory.

Native Resolution
HD DVD discs contain the movie as it was meant to be viewed, maintaining the original FPS in which they were filmed. As such, the film can be shown on your TV or monitor in what is referred to as its 'native' format. It is when this image is transmitted from the player, and then received, translated, and projected onto your screen that the different resolutions begin to get involved.

1080i-30 Resolution
First of all, the "i" at the end of the 1080 stands for interlace, and it's important to understand what that means. Imagine the following:

Take a picture and cut it into 1080 lines, with each line being numbered.
The first thing you do, is to draw all the even numbered lines on the screen. The collection of all the even-numbered lines is called a "field".
In the next sixtieth of a second, you then go back to the top and draw all the odd-numbered lines. This is the second field.
Two fields make one frame, so the process has to happen twice as fast as the number of frames shown per second.
Repeat the process indefinitely and you'll understand exactly how your TV handles projecting a 1080 interlace image.
Historically, interlacing was first used in TV signals because CRT displays built in the 1940s could simply not work fast enough to draw every line in one-sixtieth of a second.

Understanding exactly what each resolution
means to your HD DVD experience
is an important foundation to have.
This technique—while still maintaining a great picture—creates problems because of the frame rate conversion.

3:2 Pulldown
The number 30 after 1080i reflects the number of frames being shown per second. Note that this doesn't match the 24 FPS your movies are being filmed in. This signal format causes the film to be transferred to your display in an artificial sequence as the DVD player needs to translate a 24 FPS source into a 30 FPS video signal. This process is called "3:2 pulldown," which repeats 12 fields of the 24 FPS source to generate a 30 FPS signal. Pulldown causes an odd "judder" movement in the image as it shows one frame for two fields, then three fields for the next frame, and so on and so forth.

No actual information is lost—the entire normal film frame is still present, it has just been transferred to the display with 12 repeated fields. A modern display can remove those 12 fields and recover the original 24 FPS signal. In other words, with a proper display, a 1080i picture will look identical to a 1080p picture when you begin with film material source like that from HD DVD.

 

Cont'd:

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The hottest team in video entertainment.

Incidentally, the 1080i input resolution is one you find on all HDTVs, and it is the most common HD broadcast format. For example, if you watch a movie or show broadcast in HD, it's usually presented in 1080i30. Look for the HD logo at the beginning of the show to be sure.

1080p-60 Resolution
The "p" at the end of 1080 stands for progressive, and the distinction between it and an interlaced image is important to understand, if only to know that it makes little difference to films on HD DVD that start at 24 frames per second.

Instead of capturing only half the lines at a time, like an interlace image, a progressive image captures the whole picture—all 1080 lines—at once. This allows for a much sharper image, because all pixels are present in every frame. This 60p signal can be beneficial to a display, but only when starting with something filmed in 60p. Film material, which is shot in 24p, will not show any advantage on a modern display.

A modern display can perform an operation on the video called "inverse telecine" or "inverse 3:2 pulldown." It recognizes and removes the 12 extra fields, reassembles the remaining 48 fields into the original 24 frames, and then repeats those frames at whatever frequency the display selects (60 Hz, 72 Hz, etc.).

However, there is still a problem if a display updates at 60 FPS because it doesn't match the native 24 FPS of film—a 60 Hz refresh in the display will produce "judder" just as a 1080p-60 interconnect signal does because it also employs the 3:2 pulldown technique by showing two copies of the first frame, three copies of the next, etc.

1080p-24 Resolution
Here we have the optimum resolution, so it's valuable to note just how it works. Though called 1080p-24, it is typically displayed at 1080p-72 since this frame rate takes the 24 FPS native to the film and the HD DVD and shows each frame three times. Incidentally, this is also how most theatre projectors work using three-bladed shutters.

This resolution is progressive so you don't have to worry about visual artifacts appearing, and because 72 is a multiple of 24, you also don't have to worry about 3:2 pulldown causing an unnatural judder in movement. This is therefore the ideal framerate to display movies. PC playback can typically provide this frame rate, but today very few displays support this, though we expect to see more in the near future.

If you have a 720p TV, a 1080i30 or 1080p24 input is also optimal because the display can use the original 1080P images to resample to its display resolution (usually something like 768 lines, not 720), and repeat those frames at one of its available refresh rates (most often 60Hz). Internal scalers and filters in the display can do the best job of downscaling from 1080 to native resolution while matching the characteristics of the particular display technology.

When the input arrives as 24p or 30i with 3:2, the display knows the actual capture rate was 24p and can refresh frames accordingly. If it gets a 720p60 signal, it is less likely to detect that it was a 24p film that was somehow format converted, and probably won't be able to restore it to 24P before processing it for display.

Since HD DVD is stored on the disc at the natural frame rate of 24 frames per second, it can be displayed at any of these rates (1080i30, 1080p60, 1080p24). As you upgrade your HD display, you can take full advantage of your new display with all the HD DVDs in your collection.

There is no doubt that HD DVD will provide a significantly better viewing experience over standard DVDs, but understanding exactly what resolution means to your HD DVD experience can help you cut through the nonsense.

 

Deep breath.... close eyes from all that reading..... now type...

Your rolling the dice, as Lumadar pointed out, they are all in a new generation, just like trucks when the new generation comes out, there is always problems, any brand, any make any model......
Non are proven yet, non have passed the test of customer use over time.

Get what has the best picture, the features you want at a price you can afford to throw away. Because in 2 years you will be selling it in a yard sale for $250 and buying the next newest that are even better than todays crappy sets anyway. Mark my words.

 

good point .. the churn rate on TV's right now is about the same as computers; between 36 and 42 months.

 

FYI: I'm an artist who makes video games for a living. Couple hundred televisions are used during development and testing. Consistently I see the best pictures from Samsung and Sony LCD HDTVs.



Also have seen Plasma burn-in and fading.

 

From what I understand, Samsung and Sony both use the same LCD screens on 1080p models, which are made by Samsung...

 

Heres a little hindsight...and what I'll be doing next go round.
Buy one, watch it for a week or two, return it. Keep track of all the pro's and con's. Keep doing that till you find the one that makes you happy! It'll be a pain but it will end all doubts.
I have had a LCD for a couple years now. It was great for the price and the HD picture competes with my friends newer plasmas and DLP's. The Plasma and DLP's show a better non HD picture...thats for sure.
Inputs and outputs....you can never have enough! Get one with several HDMI's. On that note get the best cables you can find...then get better ones!
My loyalty runs deep with DirectV. Side note, Satellite signal is better than hardwired cable....trust me one that one. No proof other than seeing is believing.
Good luck man!

 

dont they charge a restocking fee ? i got directv in 1997. i had to move in a apartment in 1999 for two years so i had to get cable. i do not like cable but it is great for internet. then i bought my house i put my directv in i would never go to cable.

 

I seriously don't understand why people insist of bringing up plasma burn-in, ESPECIALLY when they say in the same sentence that it no longer applies.

I just can't find the logic in that?

As for LCD vs Plasma... it really does come down to taste. They are an entirely different technology, and the picture they put out is drastically different. You can't really describe it- you need to experience it.

I could post all of the techno nerd numbers and scientific explanation I want on the subject, but ultimately it is for you to decide what YOUR eyes prefer. Some prefer plasma, some prefer LCD. It's really that simple.

ANY quality HDTV today will give you most of the bells and whistles (with a few exceptions), and you shouldn't have any longevity issues. Yes, a plasma TV can not be "refilled," but it's going to last longer than you will keep it- I guarantee that. (8 hours a day? Who does that? At a more realistic 4 hours a day, a Panasonic or Pioneer plasma will last you 27+ years!!!)

You will suffer the ill effects of an "old set" from an LCD, DLP, or CRT long before a plasma... but at the same time I'm sure ANY will last you just fine.

Good luck!

 

The average TV in the US is on for 6+ hours per day. In my home there is probably at least one TV on at any time of the day or night... with the main TV on at least 16 hours a day. As TV's are becoming more and more the display of a home media center they are being used for longer and longer hours.

My experience with plasma while working in the games industry and the television broadcast industry has left me far from impressed with their longevity. I've seen $10,000 plasmas have to be simply discarded because they were no longer serviceable.

Ultimately, I measure a displays quality on it's ability to faithfully reproduce the original image as close to the intent of it's creator... and maintain that though it's useful life. (HDTV is still young enough that no HDTV set should already have to be discarded from normal use.)