Maybe i can help
I am new to drag racing but have been working in the electronics field for 15 years. heres a low down on the new tv's
First off never trust what you see at the big box stores, It is very easy to make any set look like it has the best picture by adjusting a few of the controls. Once you are considering a tv make sure you get your hands on the controls and make some adjustments to brightness, contrast and tint and make sure none of them are maxed to begin with.
now as for the technologies
all tv's fall into two catagories
analog or digital
analog
CRT
(pro's)
Still has the best possible picture, fairly forgiving to poor incoming signals.
(cons)
Size and weight
digital
all digital sets have one drawback, unlike analog sets that can make the most out of poor signals all of the digital sets have a chip inside called a scaler, what this chip does is take the analog picture information and calculate what color and brightness level each and every pixel should be considering that the average tv has around 1 million pixels that are changing 30 time a second this is alot of calculation for the chip to make. A very large portion of the price differance between the cheap sets and the high end ones can be this chip. In fact it is not unheard of to buy an external scaler that can cost around $5000 by itself.
Digital sets have a problem with very fast moving objects, they tend to make the edges either seem very jagged or the object a little jerky
Plasma
Plasma is what i call an active display,meaning that each pixel is actually creating the light that you see.
(pros)
Will give you the best picture and most contrast ratio of all of the digital sets.
Very good color reproduction. Size
(cons)
Plasma can "Burn In" if left with a static image for too long, ever see the screen at an ATM where you can still see the welcome screen once the screen changes, this is burn in not good in a TV. they are getting better but something to watch for. Also Plasmas are basicly consuming themselves when producing a picture so the brightness will slowly go away with use although this is measured in the thousands of hours.
Both LCD and DLP are what i call passive displays, the light that you see is either being filtered through a million little filters(LCD) or bounced off a million little mirrors(DLP)
LCD televisions come in two flavors LCD projection and LCD flat screen.
LCD Projection
LCD projection uses three little Panels one for green, red, and blue. The white light is split into the three primary colors and passed through the lcd panels to create the picture you see on the screen and i feel will give you the better picture between LCD and DLP projection sets
LCD televisions come in two flavors LCD projection and LCD flat screen
LCD projection.
LCD flat screen
As a general rule LCD flatscreens make sense below the 42 inch screen size. they do make them larger although they usually cost more then the same size plasma.
DLP
DLP sets very often use only one chip to make the three different colors so instead of making the calculations 30 times a second they have to make them 90 times a second. The light is passed through a color wheel that is spinning around 10,000 rpm and when the wheel is green all of the mirrors that need to be green are switched on. Because of the color wheel system DLP seem to have the hardest time with very fast moving objects.
They do make three chip DLPs although the are way more expensive.
So in sumation, Here are the technologies in order of picture quality.
CRT
Plasma
LCD
LCD projection
DLP
That is not to say that a cheap plasma will beat a very good DLP, this is more of a general Rule of what each technology is capable of
Hope it helps and if you have any other questions please feel free to ask.
Todd
It would really suck to have a $4500 tv fall from the wall!!! We put ours on a tv stand not only due to weight ,but plasmas get really warm and we didnt want it up against the wall (my wife thought it would catch the wall on fire
)
I'm very happy with it. It won't burn in any channel logo's either. I'm on digital cable and the picture is fantastic. HD is really cool too, it makes you want to throw the others away.
