Plasma power consumption varies according to content, whereas LCD is pretty constant, so the number you get on the rating plate is a maximum, but the average is 60-70% of that dependant on brightness, however an LCD is running at 80-90% of the rating all the time. There's very little between them.
I won't lie, I have no idea what most of that means :-)
Agreed on that though! I used to think LCD was the way forward, but I'm muchly happy with my plasma and seeing it, after my old LCD, definately is a win for the plasmas.
Good lord. Do people actually buy these things? When a mate of mine bought herself a 40" Toshiba plasma from Currys, on the recommendation of the staff, and her dad [1] she bought a £50 HDMi cable for her none-HD/BluRay/Upscaling cheapo DVD player. CPC do ones that are probably better for like, £9 :-)
[1] Really nice guy, not the sharpest tool in the box though. I've been to fix their 'computer' (heap of shit on Win98) a few times, and he's one of those that stands there offering their ideas. He installed some new sound stuff and it buggered the sound output and he offered that maybe the songs couldn't fit in the CPU and were bottlenecking... ( ? ). No idea, but he pays a man to fix it now, takes it away every time, does nothing, charges him £50+. The whole lot is worth about £0.02, including it's 15" CRT and the loudest hard drives I have heard for a long time -
*CLICKCLICKCLICKCLICKCLICKCLICK*
You are right, of course - all these things are down to personal preference, but there is a technical side to it as well, and technically the CRT is still vastly better, particularly than LCD, in many respects. I reckon that the fashion, the practicality and the sudden availability of ridiculous sizes in flat-panel TVs has more to do with their popularity than anything to do with picture quality. Which is all fine, except that it has been TOO ubiquitous a change, and now we have lost CRT technology - we have taken a technological step backwards for the sake of fashion, and that seems like a shame to me.
But that is simply a matter of development - late CRT monitors were getting a dot pitch of .17mm - plenty high enough, even taking into account bleeding between pixels, for high res digital sources. Dynamic processing can help enormously with convergence and accuracy. There was even some pretty impressive development with tessellated micro-screens to generate large, thin(ish) panels and overcome the 32" barrier.
Blergh. Modulated backlights are the devils work. It's like the 911 - making it work despite fundamental flaws in the design.
All the per-pixel intensity variation and burn-in of, er, plasma... Heh, actually I agree, but I need something that I can use as a PC monitor without worrying about the damage I might be doing.
Is your front room like a 1 metre square or something?
Plus, in a room bigger than a small shoe box, if you try and watch it from the other side of the room you'd need binoculars. My 42" sits on the chimney breast with about a foot of space either side, an 8" gap to the mantel below. and a gap sized betweem the others, to the ceiling with a clock it in. It's as if it was made to measure heh.
We did look if they were any HD CRTs available, but the only one I could find trace of was a Samsung that had gone out of production, but cost over a grand.
Then we looked for low to middle priced CRTs and you couldn't find anything reasonable quality in 28" for less than the price we paid for the LG LCD. We decided that we might as well go for the benefit of slightly larger screen and much lower weight/space.
LOL! Not quite. It's hardly big though. And I daresay, I don't watch much television.
Nah, it isn't that bad. From here, the far corner of the room under the stairs at the notebook, I'm, hmm, say 3.5 to 4 metres away. I can see it just grand from here!
I'd not want to race in GT4 or Forza Motorsport from this distance so I take your point!
Friend did a similar thing with computer monitors. He was/is a CAM programmer (designing the basic algorithms), so had a traditional CAD/CAM setup with posh 21" screen (when they were posh, not merely slightly bigger than normal :-) ). He went down to a 17" because he never used more than a small portion of the big one and it just dominated his vision too much.
I've just checked our telly - 28" widescreen. Wouldn't want anything much shorter - widescreens need height (the little ones just look silly), but it's on the verge of dominating the room too much, and that's 3.5m away from me on the sofa. Bloke I bought the BX from had one of those 42" projection Toshibas in a rather smaller living room than ours - fine for watching telly, I s'pose, but I wouldn't want it looming at me while I did other stuff.
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