I always find that LCD screens never look quite as sharp as CRT for some reason - there just seems to be a certain 'softness' to the picture. It may just be down to what I'm used to, but I still prefer the quality of a CRT picture. So I'm already getting excited about this little baby.
The detailed information I've found on that suggests it's 100Hz. If I can't switch off the 100Hz then I'll not be buying one.
Oh you've peed on my bonfire now - I didn't realise that. In which case I might wait til I've seen one in action before getting too excited.
Yup, agreed. Let me know if you see one before I do!
Again, being tres thick when it comes to these things, what is the problem with it being 100Hz?
Nothing is broadcast at 100Hz, it's all 50Hz. In order to increase the screen refresh rate to 100Hz the television interpolates what it thinks should be in the intervening spaces between what is being transmitted. The manufacturers will tell you that this improves the picture but I've yet to see this improvement for myself - I don't like the effect it creates.
When I had to buy a new TV I looked agan at 100Hz - having had one briefly several years ago, but soon getting shot of it. The picture does look very solid, and film DVDs looked great, but I tried a DVD with 50Hz scrolling credits (My Family) and they were unreadable because of the interpolation.
Although flat screen technologies are appropriate for some people, I don't see them as a must have, nor as an improvement in terms of quality. I'd still go for a decent CRT (Sony Triniton or Panasonic Quintrix) rather than any flatscreen unless you don't have the space for it.
LCD and plasmas are remarkable technologies for applications where the thin flat screen is an advantage for size reasons (i.e. laptop computer displays, wall mounted information screens) but I see no real reason to have one for any other reason - LCDs suffer from restricted viewing angles (modern LCDs are certainly much better but the restriction is there nevertheless) whilst plasmas suffer terribly from screen burn (which in these days of huge in-your-face opaque DOGs is not something you want to have). Perceived picture quality with either display technology is either the same as CRT, or worse. And with an LCD, anything other than a clean RGB signal looks awful because the nature of the technology makes the display so sharp that the effect of colour bleeding/RF noise on a composite/RF source is visible to greater degrees than you ever thought imagineable.
Don't be taken in by shop demonstrations - they are designed to demonstrate what the screen is good at, and great pains are taken to avoid showing what it's not. As a general purpose TV display used for watching a variety of different material, I still haven't seen anything which can beat CRT.
50Hz CRT for me - still the best picture - and what broadcasters use for any decent objective picture quality decisions. Even when shooting in HD - CRTs are still the best monitoring quality options.
LCDs suffer from poor colour gamut, poor black level and motion smear. Plasmas are better in this respect - but they suffer from poor greyscale (they have to run at very high refresh rates and use sub-fields to generate greyscales and often use dithering as well), and dodgy screen burn issues.
If I had to chose between Plasma and LCD - I'd chose a plasma - as the gamma, black level and chromaticity are better than LCD in most cases - but neither come close to a decent CRT.
Neither LCDs nor Plasmas usually use 100Hz processing. LCDs have such poor motion lag they don't flicker at 50Hz, and Plasmas run at over 300Hz as a result of their subfields.
I suspect that the Philips "HD Prepared" CRT sets (not HD Ready for some reason - though they meet the HDCP/HDMI, 720/1080 and 50/60Hz criteria - so it must be 720 line vertical resolution they don't quite meet) and the Samsung "HD Ready" CRTs will both run at 100Hz (576/100i) with 576/50i inputs, rather than 576/50p or scaled to 1080/50i. You can't expect an HD CRT to display a 576/50i input as 576/50i - the line rate is too different to 1080/50i. (576/100i, 576/50p, 1080/50i all have a very similar line rate)