Wednesday, April 05, 2006

Lies, lies & HD Televisions!

I buy lots of stuff from Novatech - they are great for PC parts but they really have fallen into the same set of falsehoods as the high street when it comes to selling plasma and TFT televisions. The HD Ready logo seems to mean exactly the opposite - the only sets I have seen that really are HD ready (i.e. that can display a 1080i signal without down-scaling) don't bother with it. All of the 720 line units (and worse the 768 line plasmas) can't be described as HD ready now that Sky (and the Beeb) have committed to 1080. Aside from the fact that HD-DVD (in whatever flavour wins out) will be 1080 you have to realize that spending a grand on a cheap plasma that can display a bit more resolution than your tube TV (but can only display half the motion renditions - no solid state monitor can yet display interlaced pictures - even worse if it's a TFT it's running at 60hz and doing some awful pull-down on the pictures) is a waste of money. If you're in the market for a new TV and you care about picture quality your choice seems either a decent tube (there are a still a few!) or spend >£3k on a decent TFT. If you were looking to spend between £500 and £2k then save your money.
Don't let the guy in Dixons in the cheap suit persuade you to part with the readies because of how bright and gaudy the images look!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Here here! Well said, Phil