"Arfa Daily" wrote in
news

"Charles Schuler" wrote in message
. ..

Don't do it. what's wrong with the sony CRT set?
LCD's are awful , see:

What is awful about them? I was just at Best Buy and the pictures on
most them looked wonderful.

Most of the pictures that I see on them look bloody awful, so I'm not
going to be replacing my 36" Tosh CRT set anytime soon. However, I
have seen some *very* good pictures on some NEC pro plasma panels
installed at a local bar where I gave some assistance to the installer
/ supplier with some sound distribution issues. These were big mothers
- like 60" - and weighed in at a hefty 6 grand UKP each, but it just
goes to show that given the money, these things can work. I think that
part of the problem is that people trade up from a 26" CRT set to a
40" flat panel, and then sit the same distance in front of it. I have
to admit that the further you get away from them ( assuming that your
living room is big enough ) the better they look, but that's defeating
the object of upgrading the size, as you come back to, effectively, a
26" equivalent again ...

My daughter recently bought a 32" Philips LCD, and I have to say that
in general, it looks pretty good - good enough brightness, contrast
ratio and viewing angle, that I initially mistook it for a plasma.
However, that said, you can still see motion artifacts on it, and
colour shading rendition errors, that just are not there on a CRT set
with a standard off-air TV signal going in - either analogue or
digital. My mother has a Panasonic CRT set with a built in digital
tuner which is now exclusively all that is used to receive off-air
transmissions. With the exception of the low bitrate 'cheapo'
channels, which suffer from all of these digital display problems
anyway, the picture on this set is still better than my daughter's
LCD.

I think that the best advice that can be given to anyone thinking of
purchasing a flat panel TV, is to set aside a half day to go into the
stores that are selling them, have a really good look from the sort of
viewing distance and angle that you will be at in your home, and talk
to the sales person. Whether they are showing pictures from a DVD or
not, all stores have the capability of showing a real off-air picture,
so you should ask to see a variety of stations' pictures on any set
that takes your fancy. Don't be taken in by the nice darkened home
cinema demo areas either. A lot of the time, your TV will be watched
in daylight, not a darkened room. Also, don't let the salesman blind
you with just HD pictures. Make sure that you see some 'normal'
resolution pictures as well, as these will still be the standard for a
while to come yet, and if the set is operating in a non-native mode to
display these, it may perform rather less well than it does in its
native hi res mode ( a bit like LCD PC monitors ).

As far as the extended waranty deals go, I would recommend them, but
make VERY sure that the panel itself is covered under the terms of it.
Some, I believe, exclude this very expensive (both plasma and LCD)
item. Hope this helps.

Arfa




One has to remember that with any TFT LCD display,there's a certain number
of pixels allowed to be defective and still be "salable" or "good".
The LCD monitor I'm using has one bad pixel [ON,not OFF]close to the top of
the display,and fortunately not in a really objectionable location.

--
Jim Yanik
jyanik
at
kua.net