In case you hadn't already learned your lesson and started
checking behind the displays while HDTV shopping, the
HD Guru points out another element of the in-store experience that throws off buyers (and likely contributes to the
LCD vs. plasma choices we find so infuriating): lighting. In case you don't recall from your last trek to a big box superstore, the lighting is quite often stuck on blinding making it nearly impossible to discern any difference in picture quality between televisions, specifically in terms of contrast and black levels (the pictures above are of the same value priced display, at left, under normal home lighting, at right, how it looks under some store lighting setups.) Tested with an illuminance meter, all the stores (except Best Buy's Magnolia showrooms) averaged well above home ambient lighting levels, with Wal-Mart and Costco measuring the highest at 411.66 and 742.77 lux. Still, there's tips on how to get a good idea of a TV's black levels even under those circumstances, plus some choice words left over for the incredible (and useless) dynamic contrast ratio numbers every manufacturer trots out these days, so go ahead and get educated.
posted Aug 10th 2009 5:01PM
That's easy, just get some flood lights inside your house. Now it's the same!
For real. Best Buy has 50 foot ceiling with xenon street lights to light up the entire giant metal warehouse. The "Magnolia" home theater room is closer to being lit like a traditional home... but the TVs in there are expensive.
Bottom line... Any LCD TV you buy in a store will look better than the old 32" CRT TV you are replacing at home.
At my store all the TVs are mounted on the back wall, and the above ceiling lights for that wall are actually not on, so it's still relatively dark, especially compared to the rest of the store. Magnolia is still darker, of course.
@Michael
Actually CRT still blows LCD away (I'm pretty sure it still blows every currently competing technology away) from a picture standpoint. The problem is to scale to 42, 50, 60 inches we're talking about a width the size of most good sized living rooms and a weight creeping into the tons.
@Michael Scrip
My Samsung SlimFit CRT HDTV (1080i supported) at 32" has a GREAT picture, better than my buddy's 60" plasma, even if the screen is smaller. Without question. CRT is bulky, yeah, but it's far from a dead technology.
@Miguel
Your buddy plasma must be a faulty unit of crappy model.
If you could see my 60" kouro you would throw your CRT from the window.
@ a few of you
Now now.... I never said anything bad about CRT. I know all the benefits of CRT.
I meant that when people buy an LCD... they are usually replacing a older CRT. So whatever LCD they buy is probably better than the TV they are replacing. (if it's not... then why bother?)
I don't know about you guys but my Sony Bravia looks mighty fine no matter what is the lighting in the room
and it looks definitely better than this ugly screen posted by engadget
@Everyone who buys LCD...
For the love of god I hope you don't enjoy any type of ANALOG TV. Old video games, SD TV, non-upconverted DVDs, older home movies, vhs, etc. etc.
the fact of the matter is though LCD "may" be the "tech of the future" the vast majority of media is still standard definition, be it digital or analog 480i/p is still 480i/p. and that my friends, looks like shit on an LCD.
Don't believe me? play N64 or Playstation on an LCD and then play it on a CRT or Plasma. If you don't see the difference, you shouldn't be looking for an HDTV anyways.
I am a proud owner of a 1080p Kuro Elite 50in, and a 65in Pioneer Elite Cinema Vision CRT (it weighs 400 pounds) They are the gold-standard in High Definition
I always do my thorough research online before I even hit the stores so I have an idea of what models to focus my search. Picking up a TV that just looks good in the store would surely be a bad idea.
Exactly. I did some serious research online before I even stepped into the store. Made it easier to ignore what was playing on the TV and look at the actual set.
wait, which one is supposed to be better? They both look like crap.
I'm not really sure, but in their defense, the home would be darker, requiring a longer exposure time on whatever camera their using, which would explain why the left one is so washed out and blurry.
Many retailers have a 30 day return policy (some with a re-stocking charge) but no showroom is going to mimic your particular home environment. Don't people read reviews where the screens are tested for true blacks, etc? And what's the sneer for LCDs? They've come a long way in PQ and many are equivalent or better than most plasmas (esp. with the apparent demise of the Kuro range) and their selling points include their relatively light weight and thinness - where wall-mounting makes a big difference.
Yes, In best buys defense I bought and returned 3 flat screens from them before I settled on an 52" LCD from newegg. :)
LCDs>Plasma
Part of the reason I say that is to piss plasma fanboys off.
For many 'home' users, there are 2 major light scenarios they see at home: 1. extreme bright buring the day due to sunlight and the subtle dim lights of the night. Most people will not watch tv in near darkness at all times.
It reads like an industry ploy to drive buyers out of the discounters so that profit margins on the status panels can go up again.
In most cities, there are: Walmart, costco, Target, Sears and Best Buy to go and buy a tv after seeing it.
Make 25% people feel that it is not a good idea to buy a tv from Walmart/costco because the lighting there is too bright, and there, profit margins are up again.
Good ploy Best Buy.
Costco has a pretty liberal (90 day - no restocking fee) return policy, and if you buy with a Costco branded Amex card, the warranty is extended to 3 years at no additional cost. Kind of a win-win in my book, even if the selection isn't up to Magnolia standards.
How can you tell anything on those two screens, you can hardly see the person. I did a good bit of research before getting my two LCDs in what I wanted. Basing a decision on in store displays is pretty ignorant in my opinion. Unless you bug the sales guy to put them all on the exact same settings, cuz i sure wasn't gonna do it myself.
Tyler Perry movies should be used as reference DVDs for calibration.
Because of the amount of blackness shown?
There is something to be said for checking display quality using movies featuring people of color. Sure it makes inspecting the "black detail" sound like a pun, but it's an awfully good test of real world display quality.
Stores love Michael Bay type movies with lots of explosions because dynamic range gets people excited, but when you're trying to watch a movie and realizing you can't see anything but Denzel's eyes, you know there's something wrong with your tv.
This is odd. The Best Buy near me actually has lights dimmed almost entirely in the TV section and blinding everywhere else. mind you, this is not their showroom and just their normal tv section.
Agreed, Josh.
There's a section at the Best Buy stores I've been to that *does* have the televisions in a brighter part of the store, but the bulk of the larger and better sets tend to be in a darkened area along the back or side wall.
The folks looking to pick up a 30" are probably a little less demanding than the hardcore home theater types wanting a 60", and if it sucks... well, the 30's are a lot easier to bring back later.
Circuit City on the other hand was always a nightmare. The only darkened part of the store was the audio section... what the heck was THAT about?
One of my local Circuit City stores had a dimmed TV section... The newer store, though, was actually brighter than it was outside during the summer.
The logic doesn't make sense. Wash out the better sets so that people think they're getting a set thats just as good for cheaper? This may be the reasoning at Walmart. People think the cheapy Walmart set is just as good as others. But, for Best Buy wouldn't you want to show off how much better the more expensive set is so people spend more money on it?
Never mind... makes sense now that i read the whole thing. get you to buy the cheaper set because TVs are low margin. Leaving you money to buy high margin items like service contracts.
Best Buy would never lie to me...
So go to Magnolia and pick the best picture display and head on over to Costco or Best Buy for the best price. BTW does Magnolia have a deal to give you the best price if you find it elsewhere? I know Best Buy does and they own Magnolia (I think).
Just buy a Viera plasma and be done with it. Preferably a G series or better. Hands-down the best deal in HDTVs right now.
no.
Magnolia is part of best buy.
The fry's near me has its tv in a darker environment. At least the best they could do. Black ceiling and walls with little to no lighting. The only way they could do better would be to close the tv section off from the rest of the store.
I just bought a 54 inch viera v10, hands down the best tv on the market right now.
Enough with the "hands down"
I used to work at a Costco and always tried to get them to take the bulbs out over the TV section. They never would do it.
@ Willis
I guess they took you out instead?
That's why we use the internet to tell us which one is the best so we don't have to think about such complicated things!
I know at Fry's though, that the HDTV section is actually darker than the rest of the store. In fact, it's just an open room with no lights. I love Fry's.
It's only a scam in this case if they're claiming to compare cheap HDMI cable to the Monster HDMI cable. One of the links in this story is to a setup where it clearly states that one TV is using composite video. If a person doesn't know the difference between HDMI and composite before they spend hundreds, or thousands, of dollars on a flippin' television set then I don't really have a lot of sympathy for their Monster purchase.
Why is DCR considered useless?
It crushes black level detail and can make a scene look overexposed. If you want to see what I'm talking about calibrate your tv in dcr mode and normal mode with DVE(digital video essentials) then put on a dark scene with some detail and switch it between the two. You will see that dcr is the worst thing you can turn on in the tv menu.
I have to second the Viera V series. My fathers Kuro died about 6 months ago from an electrical storm and he had $2800 in his pocket from the insurance company burning a hole in his pocket. He had it shipped from sixth avenue and friday we were already drooling over it's glory. I have Samsung UN55B8000 which i paid a bit more for for the future proof technology and am now second guessing my decision. I might have to figure a way to con my father into swapping with me.
I don't really trust anything from HDGuru. The guy is heavily biased towards plasma. The shot of the cheap LCD will never look like that at home. A camera will always pick up more light bleed than your eye can see. It is one trick to show inferiority to plasma. Light uniformity will always be better with plasma.
The article doesn't make any sense. The only high contrast sets that look worse under bright light are plasma. The better LCD sets look even better under bright light, other than highly reflective samsungs. The cheap models are more washed out because they don't have the contrast to begin with. Yes they will look better than they would in a dark room but you can still spot the difference between a Proscan and a Sony.
Plasma sets look horrible in Best Buy and Walmart. The black levels on a G series look worse than the $500 Proscan and Insignia LCDs. Other than a pitch black home theater enviroment a good LCD looks better. What works in plasma's favor is that a 42" Panasonic for $1700 looks just as good as a $2800 Sony LCD even though the black levels of the plasma will be worse during any daytime viewing.
If you calilbrate a plamsa to give you the darkest blacks it will be horrible washed out in any light. That is why people are not impressed with Kuros when they see them in a place like Best Buy.
and then they see them at their buddies home.
then the game changes..
At my local Best Buy the girl who works in the Magnolia section is HOT... she's selling more TVs than any lighting scenario I could think of, 'cept if she personally came to check out the lighting in my bedroom with any TV purchase.
@ V lang
the reason pioneer kuro looks good at SD is due to its image processing,todays lcds have vastly improved image processing with good De-interlacing,its not that plasma are superior in SD,some suck due to poor image processing,lcds such as sony with BE3,BE2 pro and samsung have vastly improved image processing that is more then a match to the kuro.
Good point. Most HDTV's skimp on the SD processing to save money, and the result is that a lot of people report issues with SD content on their new HDTV's. The other issue is obviously that SD used to look fine on CRT TV's because of their lack of fixed pixels (or fixed resolution if you prefer) and when people moved up to fixed pixel displays, they suddenly realized that the content they'd been watching for years wasn't actually all that great. Having said that, even with the best image processing available, an SD signal is still going to look better on a CRT than on a plasma or an LCD, and there really is nothing we'll ever be able to do about it.
This is why you don't decide on a TV at the store.
im stuck between a Panasonic plasma 50" 1080p 600hz or a LCD Sharp 46" 1080p 120Hz.
any suggestions anyone?