On HD TVs


Here's a fews things about HD TV.

LCDs are good for bright room (read: living room), plasmas are good for dark rooms (like your home theater room if you are oh so lucky or your bedroom).

The best HD TV is not your Sony, nor your Panasonic, or your Samsung or your Toshiba. That title is Pioneer's.

So how do you tell a good HD TV from a so-so one? Look at how the screen produces black. Does the black look as black as the frame? Or is it bluish grey? Go for the one with the darkest black.

Yes, your TV is HD capable, but your videos aren't. No, you are not seeing things. The pictures in your brand new flat screen is worse than what you were getting with your old bigass TV. Why? Notice how those photos you took with your phone tend to pixelate, becomes blocky when you scale it up in your PC? The same thing.

Your HD TV screen is 1080 pixels tall, your video is 576 pixels tall. Your HD TV stretch it so that's why your pictures are bad.

WTF? Yeah.. WTF indeed.

Want real HD? Get a PS3 or a Blu-Ray player and get yourself some über expensive movies. Then only will you see what HD looks like. Or maybe hook up your HD TV to a home theater PC and download some HD movies off the web. That'll work too.

Oh, HD TV works best with HDMI cables. Those Red Yellow White cables? Throw them away. Or maybe not. You still need those for Astro and your DVD player. Great, that'll deteriorate your videos some more. No, Astro is not yet available in HD. What you are seeing is the same old stretching. The same goes for DVDs.

Oh oh.. Don't believe what the salesperson say. You don't need a RM300 HDMI cable to connect your Blu-Ray player to the TV. Find the cheapest one and be happy. Why? Unlike analog cables, a gold plated HDMI cable won't make any difference to the picture quality. Analog is electrical. Different materials have different properties. HDMI is digital. Digital is binary. Binary is a series of 1 and 0s. The same as your USB cable.

Confused? This is for your own good. Keep in mind that not all HD are created equal. There's the Full HD (1080i), 720i and 480i. And oh, you'll need to calibrate the colours to get the best quality picture.

These are the things that kept me from suggesting HD TV to anyone. Keep your old TVs, they are doing a pretty good job actually. Undeniably, HD is the future. Still, the future isn't here yet and everyone, from the production houses to the TV stations are still doing their job in standard definition. Yeah, it looks cool.. saves space, can hang on the wall some more but the reason you buy a HD TV is to watch HD content, not to admire how beautiful it is there, stuck on the wall.

Don't be a victim of marketing. They'll promise you everything but are they telling you everything? Don't fall for the branding too. Just because they slapped a fancy name to a piece of microchip inside it doesn't necessarily means that it is different from the generic one. Thank God we live in the Information Age. So why not take a few hours and do some research on this equipment before you go out there and swipe your credit card. You don't want to spend thousands just to get YouTube-ish video on that expansive slab.

So yeah.. didn't mean to offend you guys who have bought a brand new HD TV. Good for you. In a few years that TV will reward you well.

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Published:
Monday, December 29, 2008
by amerhadiazmi