On Wed, 18 Aug 2010 07:08:07 -0700, William Sommerwerck wrote:

Ah, but what glorious dust. The best Blu-ray disks -- and even cable
shows -- are spectacular.

Yeah, can't wait. I guess I have to wait, won't have the $$$ for a
month or so. My bedroom 32" HDTV is quite a thrilling watch albeit only
capable of 1080i. But I get tired of being cramped up in the bedroom
watching from a high back leather office chair. And the 32 isn't large
enough to watch from 10 feet away in my living room.

Sitting 6' from a 60" display is one of life's great sensual pleasures.
It ain't Cinerama, * but it sure beats a "big, enormous 12 inch screen"
("Little Shop of Horrors").

One other thing you might want to consider... When testing sets, try
turning the Sharpness control all the way up, and seeing what happens.

I mention this because I like ultra-razor-sharp images. "Home Theater"
magazine recommends setting the Sharpness on a Pioneer Kuro to -15. Not
centered at zero, but minus 15 -- all the way down.

Mine is set to +15 -- all the way up. What's remarkable is that this
setting produces zero -- yes, zero -- overshoot, undershoot, or ringing.
And if the source suffers from excessive edge enhancement ("Gladiator",
for example), it's not exaggerated.

Along the same lines... Make sure every form of "enhancement" is turned
off. If the set doesn't produce a good image on its own, it's unlikely
image processing will help.

* One of the demo disks you'll want is the digitally spliced-together
edition of "How the West Was Won". It's taken directly from the camera
negatives, and in everything but sheer size, totally blows away what you
see in a Cinerama theater. The set includes both a rectilinear version,
and a "smilevision" version that curves the image to represent how it
would look on a Cinerama screen. Get "2001" and "The Searchers", too.

Which set did you have? I'm trying to avoid as much shopping as possible.
Demos can be deceiving and I wouldn't mind paying a little extra and buy
from the local appliance and electronics store than say Best Buy or
WalMart. And a 60" isn't out of the realm of possibilities. 50" was just
a starting point. I was curious about these new Sharp 4 color sets too.
Just don't know if the technology is too virgin to be reliable. I'll have
the cash so a reasonable price is not as important as these other factors.
Would be cool to have some bells and whistles like a tcp/ip connection
for streaming video. Already have a decent Sony / Infinity 5:1 audio in
place.




--
Live Fast, Die Young and Leave a Pretty Corpse