I want a new telly

[Llamatron]

I was in Comet yesterday looking at the big fancy LCD TVs.
Is it my imagination or are the pictures, for anything other than HD, just plain rubbish?
Even the new Sony Bravia was pants and that was showing terristrial digital TV using it's own tuner so I can't blame a week signal from a video splitter. Nor can I accept that being a large screen they simply exaggerate the inadequacies of low resolution images. The Sony was only 8 inches bigger than my old 32 inch CRT and the image quality wasn't even close.

Why are big LCD TVs just so pants and why on earth are we all falling for it?

I need a new TV and I'm really stuck as to what the hell to go for.

[rojash]

"Is it my imagination or are the pictures, for anything other than HD, just plain rubbish? "
It's just your imagination

[mattfox]

I think it's because the stores don't set them up after customers come in and muck up all the settings, making all the displays too bright, too dark, stretched or squashed (4:3 in a 16:9 screen or vice versa)...

[Llamatron]

Maybe I'm just being picky but I've yet to see any flat panel TV or monitor whose image clarity, brightness and colour is as good as even a cheap CRT.

[kempie]

The CRT is still the gold standard when it comes to exhibiting rich colour, smooth motion and deep blacks with superb detail. Canon and Toshiba have been developing the technology to create a better flat panel, called SED (surface-conduction electron-emitter display).

It uses 6,220,800 electron emitters, one for each colour per pixel, that cause red, blue or green phosphors to glow. SEDs have higher contrast, more accurate color and better motion response than LCD or plasma, while consuming less power.

http://www.canon.com/technology/canon_tech/exp lanation/sed.html

[mikeyp]

I'd have thought it's simply because PAL has a set resolution and these tvs have a much higher one. I watched a dvd on my new monitor recently and noticed that it looked worse than before (of course its the same dvd, but my perception of it is different).

The point of HD as far as I can tell is to transmit at a higher resolution and so allow bigger tvs to look better. I'm not surprised that expanding a pal signal up to a large high resolution screen looks dubious.

[Llamatron]

Is your new monitor an LCD and your old one a CRT by any chance?
LCDs just don't cut it for displaying video.

I think it's something to do with how images have to be scaled to fit. With an LCD anything other than it's native resolution just looks crappy, a lot depends on what algorithms are used for the scaling.