I want your opinion on 3D TV...RIGHT NOW!

Our viewing distance (eyes, not knees) is 90 inches from a 58 inch DLP TV. For any HD source this is perfect. Obviously, SD looks pretty crappy, but I almost never watch anything in SD.

Tom

 

Not sure how "old-fashioned" you mean, but when I was a kid, TVs were always breaking down and having to be repaired. I think the biggest culprit was vacuum tubes burning out. Transistors and integrated circuits are much more reliable. One thing hasn't changed: there's still nothing but garbage being broadcast. The sole objective of broadcasters is to get you to buy crap. Television is one big crapfest.

 

TV's can last a long time. LEDs will get about 25 years before death. With LCD's and DLPs replace the CCFLs every few years and you are good. Poorly built DLPs with convergence issues though aren't worth it. CRT style sets will last the longest in terms of free-maintence. So if you are like daniel and don't watch tv, then a simple CRT to watch PBS or something once a month would be the best bet.

I have an old 70's set with the giant rotary dial for channel selection and the colour button that turns everything green. It still works except every now and then the picture gets green and fuzzy. Power cycle fixes it.

But no matter how much you think "this is the tv that I will make last forever", its shininess will wear off and 3-5 years later there will probably be something newer, better, or just different. So TV's don't have to last forever. And I can't do anything with the old set. It has 1 coax connection in. The only things I have with a coax connection anymore are my Super Nintendo and my Atari through an adapter. I have to use a modulator box to get it to accept composite (Yellow/Red/White) and then I have barely anything that uses composite...

The point of TV manufacturers offering firmware upgrades is because it is conceivable that in the future there will be a "Futuristic Connection X" to HDMI adapter box that works just fine with some new software translation. Not to mention with internet applications you need updates. What if your tv had a MySpace app right now? That would be pretty useless compared to a Facebook application. What if Quikstir caught on and then you bought a TV with that only for Netflix to can it? The ability to stay current with the times is a big feature.

Im sure you've had that tv that had a quirk. Something irritating that you wish they would change. Even the manufacture says "yup its a problem, it is in the errata". Nothing they can do except replace hardware. Now they can push a firmware update and be done with it.

 

I like having updates from the Internet. It beats early obsolescence, and is certainly easier than sneaker-net.

On the other hand, I wish technology companies were more careful with updates. With some of them, the cure is worse than the disease.

Tom

 

From the time I was about 12, my job was to take the tubes to the local drug store and run them through the tube tester anytime there was a TV problem. That caught the most common problems.

TV tuners and tube sockets were the next most common problem after the set got to be a few years old. They both used cheap materials and would develop a light layer of corrosion to protect them from electrons

A shot of TV tuner cleaner to the sockets and tuner and twisting the tuner knob a few times or insterting and removing the tubes a few time would usually get them working right again. We lived in a fringe signal area and the least corrosion in the tuner caused snow in the picture. Once that process started it took a shot of cleaner about every 6 months to keep things working right.

I don't miss the good old days of electronics one bit.

We lived in Spokane until 1951 and there was no TV there. We got our first TV when we moved to Riverside, CA in 1951.

 

I have lived with a Sony KDL52W4100 going on three years now. Never seen a better picture so I disagree that Samsung is the best. You can get these things for about $1200 these days. If there are backlight issues with a set like this I've never seen them. Also, 120 Hz is good enough for me. I've never regretted my purchase and I hope it lasts forever.

I'd also like to comment on another unnecessary technical farce: Blu-Ray. One word: Useless.

 

Agreed. Blu-ray is fabulous if you have a TV that will show the difference.

Tom

 

If you are like me, you won't be watching PBS. Just some movies and Teaching Company lecture series (when they are not available as audio alone).

For watching movies with a projector on a really big screen (about five feet across) Blu-Ray gives a much better picture than DVD.

I have no use for all the "interactive" crap, however, and it annoys me that the player always connects to the network (for no good goddamn reason!) every time I insert a B-R disc.

 

...Blu-Ray also needed for 3D DVDs, right?
also something like Oppo BDP Blu Ray does great job up-converting to HD from standard DVD

 

And don't forget lossless HD audio! I've been collecting a few BD concerts ranging from classical to rock concerts...it looks and sounds so much better then Palladia on my HDTV channels. Part of it is the extra bandwidth, some of it is fully discrete surround sound that can reveal how the source was mixed. The difference between DVD, streaming, HDTV, and blu-ray is not just differences in resolution...but bandwidth. Higher bandwidth will have less compression artifacts.

The other advantage of BD is that there are so many older movies or classics that are getting good restorations. Last night I watched The African Queen on BD. I don't think it's ever looked or sounded as good. Or take Baraka: a movie that was filmed on 70mm. The BD title is the only home video that comes close to what the visuals were like in the theater...and the audio track is an immersive 96khz. It and quite a few other titles are demo worthy in comparing blu-ray with other formats.

 

There's no such thing as "3D DVDs". For the 3D content on HDTVs, you need a faster refresh rate then NTSC standards (which is 60HZ). Originally, most that content was coming from a desktop computer...that could send a signal to capable monitors at a higher refresh rate. The main reason for the BD group to have to update their standards for a 3D BD...is that the HDMI profiles have to have larger bandwidths and the hardware needs faster refresh rates.

The main problem that I have with home videos, especially trying to upconvert many older DVDs, is that they're not compressed very well and they come from older masters. No matter how good an upscaler is...the BD title is going to look better because it is inherently 6 times the resolution of a DVD. And also with many titles that have gone through a restoration, they're coming from sources that are 4k or 8k resolutions (4 or 8 times the resolution of HD).

 

Because it takes tons of time to load and I can't see the difference. By the time A BD loeds and I figure out how to get past all the coming attractions many minutes have passed. Maybe I could see the difference if I did a side by side critical viewing in a darkened room, but that's not how or where I watch TV or movies.
I'm sure it is important to many people but just not to me.
The only appeal is if the content fits on one disk instead of two. I hate watching a concert and getting up in the middle to change disks.

The quantum leap for me was standard TV to 1080I/P HD LCD. Anything beyond that is incremental and just frosting on the cake. My eyes aren't the best so what I save on hi res video I spend on glasses and contacts.

 

Yes, but the piracy warning is much nicer now.

I'd appreciate [Just play the goddamn movie and yes I know piracy is a crime] as the default.

 

I think you won't see a difference until you are viewing a large enough image. On a small screen, there might not be a noticeable difference. My projector screen is 5 feet wide, and the difference between DVD and Blu-Ray is quite striking.

The Blu-Ray discs do take longer to load, and it angers me that the BR insists on connecting to the internet even though I have ZERO interest in all the "interactive" crap. Difficulty getting through the promos is not unique to BR. I rented a DVD once that would not permit me to either bypass or fast-forward through five minutes of promotional crap. Not even previews! Just crap about how wonderful the studio was. But MOST discs let you fast-forward through everything but the piracy warning, which both DVD and BR have.

Bottom line, the slower loading and other crap are worth it for the spectacular image quality.

 

loaded our brand new harry potter blu ray in our brand new low end panasonic bluray player. no internet accessability. flew thru all the advertising and enjoyed the best picture we have ever seen on our 7 year old panasonic 42" flat screen tv. what's not to like?

 

You should try a decent BD player. A Blu-ray menu is actually a program, not just a canned video loop as with DVDs. This is both good and bad. The good is that BD menus can offer more features and function. The bad is that many BD players go cheap on processing power, leading to slow load times. It's just like running a program on an old computer. These substandard BD players leave users with a bad impression, as you have found.

Another problem is that many BD players were shipped while the Blu-ray format was still evolving. These older players are confused by newer BD disks. A firmware update is required.

Tom

 

Newer BD players are faster to load, and you can disable BD-Live. Some players are better about having "disable BD-Live" so that you can still check for firmware updates. If yours doesn't, though, you can disable the ethernet and just enable it when you want to manually check for a firmware update. This comes in handy especially for Universal titles: since they love to have no BD-Live content except running ads on your menus and a silly time or weather applet.