TV sets
Its been a month since my last blog entry, iam not sure if thats bad or not, anyway heres some more halfway offtopic crap, i want(ed) to buy a new TV set as the one i have here is _old_ and doesnt really work very well …
First question CRT or LCD?
CRTs, are old, many shops dont have any CRT based TV sets anymore and everyone seems to know they are old and inferrior
LCDs, shiny new technology, flatter and better, well wait, why exactly does every LCD TV below 1000€ have a _vastly_ inferrior picture quality then my mothers el-cheapo noname CRT TV which probably costed < 200€ … and iam not saying the ones above 1000€ where better, just out of my acceptable price range and many showing high resolution HDTV which made fair comparission hard …
Size
for CRTs size seems strongly correlated with quality and features, no 55cm 100hz TV sets for example, it also seemed like larger isnt realy more expensive, for LCDs of coarse larger is much more expensive …
100hz CRT vs 50hz
50hz flickers, and actually i somehow cant get rid of the feeling that its stronger flickering then 50hz TV sets had a few years ago
100hz dosnt flicker, wait, actually i found just one 100hz TV set <300€ which didnt had at least part of the image flickering, all others had parts of the TV channels logo flickering also with 100hz you can choose between some residue interlacing artifacts or “staircase” artifacts on moving objects, ive not found any 100hz tv set which didnt show some artifacts allthough in the end i prefer 100hz over 50hz the artifcats are less annoying then the flickering IMHO
Comparing TV sets
Well you walk into a shop with TV sets, many TV sets … all showing different stuff, and if you are lucky and they show the same then its a crappy dark low quality music video from MTV completely unsuitable for comparing, but wait one shop had remote controls “attached” to each tv set so customers could change settings and channels as they liked, sadly less then half the remotes where working …
Summary, conclusion and personal oppinion (yeah as if the whole blog was anything but subjective personal oppinion)
LCDs have imporved, more in the written numbers then in reallity, CRTs seems to have become worse but still LCDs are behind CRTs both in quality and quality per price
many TV sets be it CRT or LCD show terrible artifacts
50hz CRTs: flickering
100hz CRTs: staircase or interlacing artifacts on moving objects
CRTs in general: some cases of brightness-size dependance, most have oversharpened and too strongly saturated images (yeah last 2 are purely an adjustment thing, probably done as most customers are idiots and prefer oversharpened and too strongly saturated images)
LCDs: washed out blurry images, colors more or less wrong, aritifacts caused by slow reaction times not to mention 2-4 times as expensive as CRTs