NEW HDTV advice PLASMA or LCD

[oldandinthe way]

The motion issue is the only advantage plasma has.

Manufacturers of LCD TVs have been working on proprietary enhancements to minimize the effects of the the lag. Expect the next wave of LCDs to shrink this gap. Until the products actually ship it will be difficult to predict how successful they are.

Also expect lower power consuming LCD backlights.

[coen99]

One discussion that pops-up everytime is about the power consumption. Who cares ? What are we talking about ? 30 Euro's/dollars per year !

I take it the concern for our environment, global warming and such moot trivialities hasn't reached The Netherlands?

/Mats

I think a discussion beyond this topic.
But when you really care you tell them in Las Vegas to dim a few lights, or ask people to stop driving cars like the Hummer? Everything is relative.
So tell me, is a lightbulb of 40 Watts economical ?
Not if you compare it to a lightbulb of 15Watts HOWEVER if you compare it to a lightbulb of 100 Watts it is economical.

So are you?, or am I environmental friendly ?
For sure I'm ! if I compare myself to the energy wasted by eg. Las Vegas
So I'm environmental unfriendly, compared to whom ?

Anyway, this is really off topic and really not the issue.

[mats.hogberg]

No - sorry to be off topic. Mostly just pulling your leg.
Now back to our regular broadcast!

/Mats

[jpavery]

I'm in the market for a new 1080p. I'm going with Plasma. I choose Plasma 2 years ago over LCD.

I've never had a problem with:
a) burn in
b) life span - two years later and it is still working and I want to replace it now

The picture has always looked great too (except for blacks and near black...gradients).

When I was looking in the stores back then, the LCDs didn't look very good at all.

[samijubal]

Panasonic or Pioneer plasmas are superior to LCD in every way, unless watching in a bright room. Contrast ratios are better, color accuracy is far better, no motion blur, looks better with poor quality input sources, uniform screen brightness edge to edge, the list goes on. Maybe someday LCD will catch up, but that day isn't today.

[sanlyn]

There is no way I'm getting rid of my Toshiba 27" CRT (SD NTSC) or my Sony 32" HDTV (CRT). Plasma? LCD? You have to be kidding. When you move from a high-quality CRT to an LCD or plasma you lose millions of colors and get stuck with artifacts and a narrow brightness range that I find intolerable. True, one of my CRT's weighs 85 pounds. True, the SONY had to be ordered from J&R in Manhattan and cost $85 to ship. In either case, I still haven't spent anything near the price of those godawful "digital" screens (which ultimately have to convert to analog anyway, because your brain can't see or hear digital. Your eyes and ears and your other senses are analog devices, not digital).

I believe someone earlier in this post said most DVD's are in widescreen format (not true), and those that are in their original 4:3 format can't be displayed on a digital TV in 4:3 (not true). It is true, however, that most HDTV sets, especially LCD and plasma, do a damn poor job with analog sources. But many HDTV's are fully capable for both; you just have to shop around and spend a little more.

Just as the advent of Cinemascope movies destroyed any pretense about maintaining visual integrity in the movie business (it took almost 10 years for cinematographers to master that format, and they finally decided that the narrower Panavision was far more sane), it will take HDTV another 10 years to get as clean as an old first-class analog system. I have a digital cable box (SD NTSC) and a new digital cable box (HDTV), and both of them deliver so many digital artifacts that I avoid many stations altogether and throw out a lot of DVD recordings that I consider too visually annoying to be watchable.

Anyway, I have ranted about the misuse and abuse of digital video elsewhere, I'm simply repeating it here. I have some old VHS SP recordings off my former analog cable box dating back 8 years or more. They were recorded on my long-dead SONY SLV-585HF and SLV-696HF VCR's onto high grade tape. I recently converted many of these to DVD on my 'puter Once you filter out the minimal VHS tape noise and use a decent bitrate for MPEG conversion, they look pretty darn good.

I have no argument about digital audio/video having the potential for much improvement over analog or NTSC. It certainly does. But consider this: a few years ago the avergae consumer spent $100 on a VCR and $250 on an analog TV. Today they spend 10 to 20 times that much on the same digital equipment and rave about the improvements. Why are they so surprised that $350 worth of electronics performs more poorly than gear that costs $3500? Well, duh! I have a $3000 analog phono turntable with a $450 phono pickup, $400 worth of alignment tools and enhancements, and it's played through a $8500 system. I am not surprised that many of my old LP's sound better than a lot of sloppily produced CD's, nor am I surprised that this system sounds better than my neighbor's $125 AIWA box and its cheapo record changer that blew up after 90 days.

A pox on digital -- at least, until the powers-that-be start inisting on higher standards and take more pride in their product. Hollywood still makes its original movies on celluloid and the highest-quality CD's are still recorded on tape, and both of these mastering media are analog. And also recall: unless some clever people doing stem cell research can come up with something otherwise, your ears and eyes are analog. You can digitize all you want, but you still need analog to see or hear it. That's why every digital device has a chip called a DAC -- for those who don't know, DAC means Digital to Analog Converter, without which your digital gizmo is useless.

I can hardly wait for someone to come out with digital food and boast about how much of an improvement it is. Imagine: a digital lasagna with a cheap DAC. I can't stand it.

[edDV]

USA readers note the latest Consumer Reports Magazine ranks plasma, LCD and rear projection HDTV sets. Worth a look. Winners varied by screen size and price level but in general by brand ...

Plasma: Panasonic, Pioneer, LG

LCD: Sony, Samsumg, Sharp

RPTV: Sony, Samsung, Mitsubishi

[Richard_G]

I believe someone earlier in this post said most DVD's are in widescreen format (not true), and those that are in their original 4:3 format can't be displayed on a digital TV in 4:3 (not true). It is true, however, that most HDTV sets, especially LCD and plasma, do a damn poor job with analog sources. But many HDTV's are fully capable for both; you just have to shop around and spend a little more.

Yes, I did. What I actually said was

As for comments about watching 4:3 on a widescreen TV, you will have difficulty finding any. Unlike the US, virtually all DVDs and most broadcast TV is in widescreen anyway. The UK has been broadcasting widescreen for a number of years and it is very difficult to buy a non-widescreen TV (except for small portables) for this reason. I haven't seen a 4:3 TV larger than 21" on sale in years. When some of the older stuff that is in 4:3 is broadcast most TVs will adjust the set to either display bars on either side or show the picture over the full width of the screen but cutting off the top and bottom. Unless you spend all your life watching UKTV Gold, burn in isn't going to be a problem.

Note one important phrase, "unlike the US". The OP is in the UK so comments were aimed at him. You may still be able to buy DVDs in 4:3, and TV sets to display them, in the US but you can't here. Fortunately we do not have to put up with the curse of NTSC so our SD is far better quality than yours in the first place. For example, I don't think anyone has ever made a CRT HDTV for the European market, there is no demand.

Other than general comments, most of which seem to be out of date (burn in WAS a problem with early generation plasma and flickering and smearing WAS a problem with early generation LCD) not a lot of what has been said in this thread is relevant to the location of the OP.

[Seeker47]

But consider this: a few years ago the avergae consumer spent $100 on a VCR and $250 on an analog TV. Today they spend 10 to 20 times that much on the same digital equipment and rave about the improvements. Why are they so surprised that $350 worth of electronics performs more poorly than gear that costs $3500?

Hey, I'm a digital skeptic too (a bit more so for music than for video ...), but I wonder what you consider "average." No VCR I ever bought cost anywhere near $100., and the only CRT I bought that was anywhere near your $250. figure was a 13"-er. A 27" JVC CRT cost me $600., back in 1996. Your 10 - 20x figure for digital is a bit off, too. My 32" Toshiba LCD set (not some secondary brand like Olevia or Vizio) ran about $760. + tax. (I do try to shop around for a good deal, though.)

[sanlyn]

Not disputing your comments, Richard_G, and here's to qualify mine. I'm a great fan of old movies all the way back to the silent era, of which I have a huge collection going back some 20 years on VHS and newer DVD's, and on cable tv (when the signal is decent). Yes, I've visited the UK and seen 4:3 movies broadcast and displayed with sidebars on widescreen TV's. I don't really see anything wrong with that -- why would you want to watch Casablanca and look at Ingrid Bergman stretched over a 16:9 screen looking as if she weighed 450 pounds and had no forehead and no tummy? You know the scene where Ingrid pulls a pistol on Bogart and demands those letters of transit? If you stretch that 4:3 image and cut off the top and bottom, as 16:9 screens do, you never see the pistol, which leaves you wondering what the heck is going on.

I have many complaints about what the electronics industry is doing to the image we get, but the ignorance of the average digital consumer is a little more than I'm willing to tolerate. When someone asks me if I wanna come over for a little snack and see their brand-new 164-inch 29:2 digital tv from 18 inches away, I say OK to the snack but leave the tv turned off .

I wouldn't mind spending $4000 on a good digital HDTV, but to make room for it I'd have to ditch one of my perfectly good CRT's. No way. I've seen some $15,000 plasma sets that just don't do it for me; the image doesn't look real, but more like an old Win 3.1 screensaver or animated Jello. However. . .for those who can't tell the difference, or don't care, or who just like the look of an image that has about 5 or 10 million colors missing, then I say spend the 5 G's and go plasma. I won't do it, don't see why I would want to, and wouldn't recommend it to anyone who can tell the difference.

I agree, NTSC was a dumb standard to begin with, pretty much like that great American invention called Velveeta compared to good Yorkshire cheese. I can play PAL format here on my PC and can certainly see the difference, and when visiting British hotels I can definitely see that their tv image is better than any ripoff U.S. corporate giant could deliver over here with NTSC.

Wide screen never did anything for me anyway. Your eye doesn't see in wide-screen and your brain ignores the edges anyway, which is why so little information of importance appears there. As a young man the first thing I noticed about Cinemascope was that I always seemed too far away from the action on the screen; I kept moving down to the front row of the cinema. In some cases, I just left the theater because many of the early wide screen films were so lacking in visual interest. There's a reason why artists settled on the Golden Mean and 4:3 as visual ideals some 8000 years ago. I feel those same reasons have something to do with why many 1954 audiences looked at Cinemascope, yawned, and went home to watch Lucy on (roughly) 4:3 tv screens. It was a matter of content, as well as of visual involvement.

IMHO I'd rather look at a little common analog noise or even a dash of chroma bleed rather than spend 5 seconds watching digital artifacts, and will take well-made PAL or NTSC tape or tv rather than endure 1000-plus lines of FM hash, mosquito noise, pixel blocks, murky shadows, motion ghosting, and distorted ratios, in any country, any day.

[sanlyn]

[quote="Seeker47] but I wonder what you consider "average." No VCR I ever bought cost anywhere near $100., and the only CRT I bought that was anywhere near your $250.

True, many consumers spent more than I quoted, but I go by a Consumer Reports article from 2002. In 2000 I bought a Panasonic spare VCR for $99, which was actually a little more than the $50 and $75 VCR's I saw on offer then in the discount shops. Sears, BestBuy, CircuitCity, Pennys, etc., had Sharp and Emerson 27" and 32" color analog TV's for $250 to $300 all over Long Island, and 47th Street Photo was selling the same sets for less than $200. I'd imagine that most people in this forum back then would spend a bit more, at least $300 and up for a VCR and $400 and up for a TV, and many here have invested far more. The cheapest VCR I ever bought, other than the $99 spare for my father in law, cost me $325 on closeout at J&R in New York, which was about $125 off retail. Before that, my cheapest VCR was $425 at discount, and I spent $235 having it rebuilt in 2006. But when I tell people I paid that much for my gear, they simply told me I was nuts and should never spend more than $100 for a VCR in 2000.

However . . . $700 spent today for an LCD HDTV is near or at the bottom of the line for 32" and up. I wouldn't try to get away with less than $1500 for an LCD if I were shopping this afternoon. I just don't see how you could get a highspeed DAC or wide brightness ratio for $700 today, along with some other essential features. Today I see P.C. Richards has a 32" LCD HDTV with ATSC tuner for $549, and a neighbor who shops there told me that the floor display is half gone already.

Except for a few movie fans and some severely afflicted sports addicts, I never met anyone in 7 Eastern and Southern states who spent more than $100 for a VCR or more than $300 for an analog TV back in the late 1990's or up to 2001, when prices of electronics fell precipitously, and PC prices started downhill.

Uh-oh, I think we just got off topic. Sorry.

[edDV]

When factoring historic price differeneces don't forget CPI inflation and price reduction of consumer electronics.

1. CPI Inflation

For all goods and services, the CPI multiplier from 1990 to 2008 = 2.23. That means in today's US dollar, that 27" $400 TV you bought in 1990 cost you ~$900.


http://minneapolisfed.org/Research/data/us/calc/

2. Price reduction of consumer electronics

Another way to look at it, you could buy a better 27" CRT replacement TV today (EVEN A DIGITAL READY MODEL)for less than $200. That is a 50% reduction in consumer electronics prices form $400 (1990 dollar) but is really a 78% reduction from $900 (today's dollar).

[Seeker47]

However . . . $700 spent today for an LCD HDTV is near or at the bottom of the line for 32" and up. I wouldn't try to get away with less than $1500 for an LCD if I were shopping this afternoon. I just don't see how you could get a highspeed DAC or wide brightness ratio for $700 today, along with some other essential features.

Well, I have to disagree with you here. It sounds like you have not critically researched / evaluated the better LCDs or plasma sets that are out there now, or current pricing. I was really unimpressed with the plasma I had seen, up until the more recent crop, some of which is quite impressive. (And I know people who have a few-years-old 36" - 40" HDTV-capable Sony CRTs -- the kind you need a forklift to move -- and have watched theirs.) Having or housing such monsters is not really an option for me.

You also always have to ask, "Compared to What ?" I find that Toshiba 32" LCD to be rather good. I'm not that easily pleased, either, but this LCD is clearly a damn sight better than the circa-1988 CRT (a well above-average monitor for its size and for its day) that it replaced in that room. In fact, it is good enough to have usurped the preferred-viewing-choice from the setup in the living room. I watch movies on DVD on it, often upconverted through the Oppo 980. They look good to me, and better than I expected

I wouldn't watch anything (other than brief clips) on any PC monitor.

[sanlyn]

edDV, I got my 27" Toshibo CRT in 2001 for $450 (on sale). The 32" SONY HDTV CRT was $1150 at J&R in Manhattan in 2003.

Seeker47: I agree, the digital stuff is getting better. Still can't beat my current CRT's. But I'm waiting. As soon as digital catches up, I'll have to fork up $$$ and move one of the CRT's to the basement.

[edDV]

edDV, I got my 27" Toshibo CRT in 2001 for $450 (on sale). The 32" SONY HDTV CRT was $1150 at J&R in Manhattan in 2003.

No fair comparing a HDTV to a 1990 SDTV.

In 1991 I bought a 20" Sony "E" series for $425 (on sale) and a 27" Sony XBR for $999 (also on sale).
These models had multiple S-Video in and comb filter decoders similar to today's SD CRT models that currently sell for $175-$250 including digital tuners.

HDTV and a larger screens are separate optional luxury premiums.

[sanlyn]

[quote="edDV"] No fair comparing a HDTV to a 1990 SDTV.

Point taken, edDV. I'll withdraw the HDTV (which two years earlier had actually cost $700 more) and confine things to the 27" analog SD set. Many of the features and inputs found in this 27" set didn't even exist in 1990 or even in 1995, so I don't think that type of comparison is absolute. Obviously, good tv sets have fallen in price over time. The point is, as tv prices fell, people kept buying cheaper ones, not better ones.

[edDV]

No fair comparing a HDTV to a 1990 SDTV.

Obviously, good tv sets have fallen in price over time. The point is, as tv prices fell, people kept buying cheaper ones, not better ones.

Agreed but the HD models have added back the 3D comb filters, velocity scan and expanded input formats.

[sanlyn]

Agreed, edDV. But only the top-end HD sets do well with analog sources, of which I still have a truckload. When BlueRay and the newer formats, etc., get their video problems straightend out, and if I can widen my living room another 15 feet (hard to do in a co-op building), and when I'm ready to add yet another remote to the pile on my coffee table now and another player to my wall unit -- and if the wall unit doesn't collapse under more weight -- then I'll be ready for HD. So far, I don't see any advantage.

[samijubal]

Agreed, edDV. But only the top-end HD sets do well with analog sources, of which I still have a truckload.

That's not true. I've got the bottom-of-the-line Panasonic plasma, it looks a lot better with VHS and DN than any CRT TV I've had and I have a top-of-the-line CRT, I had a high end CRT HDTV, I've also got a mid range CRT. You may need a high end LCD to look good with poor quality sources, but that's not true with plasmas.

[sanlyn]

samijubal, regarding plasma/LCD: they can't display an unlimited number of colors and shades, they burn up highlights, block up shadows, and can't get neutral grays or skin tones correct. If none of that matters, then plasma has what you want, but it doesn't give me what I already have.

I know plenty of people who can't see the difference between photos taken with a digital camera and photos taken with my old Nikon film-loaded FE-2 or FM-2 and Nikkor lenses. The differences are obvious, despite any method I've used at great expense to use pro labs (I mean pro labs in the New York publishing area that my wife's marketing firm and Hearst Publishing has used for years, not Kodak mail-order or Walmart) to have images transferred to CD, and you still can't beat Kodachrome.

Any digital representation of an image or a sound is a rounded number that discards some portion of the original signal. Digital has improved considerably in many respects. But I'm still waiting for it to catch up with 175 years of analog tweaking. I'm sure digital will get there, but for me in several critical areas it isn't there yet.

[Seeker47]

Agreed but the HD models have added back the 3D comb filters, velocity scan and expanded input formats.

While they taketh away a nifty feature like PIP. Do any panels -- even the more expensive ones -- still offer this ? (Recall those few years when built-in dual tuners were all the rage ?) Here is the practical effect: I'm recording a movie, and wish to peek in on the late news. Can't do it, because the cable box controls the channel selection -- this would screw up the movie I'm still recording. On the older, analog CRT in another room (which has PIP and is set up to take advantage of this), I can go back and forth between a ballgame and something else (dodging commercials in the process), swapping, re-sizing, and repositioning the two pictures as I wish. Sorry, but that is a GREAT feature, and I would give it up only very reluctantly . . . no matter how inferior the picture may be vs. some really good hi-def.

[davideck]

While they taketh away a nifty feature like PIP. Do any panels -- even the more expensive ones -- still offer this ?

Many VIZIO models provide PIP and POP (Two 4:3 images side by side). The remote even includes a button to swap the audio source; no more picture swapping for audio purposes.

It's like having two SDTV Monitors side by side.

[samijubal]

samijubal, regarding plasma/LCD: they can't display an unlimited number of colors and shades, they burn up highlights, block up shadows, and can't get neutral grays or skin tones correct. If none of that matters, then plasma has what you want, but it doesn't give me what I already have.

Today's Plasmas are capable of over a billion colors. Where are these analog sources that are such high quality? It's not VHS, cable, mini dishes, laserdiscs, all are flawed from the source. When you're talking about analog sources, nothing is anywhere near perfect anyway. Even my c-band satellite isn't perfect and it's far better than all the other sources I listed. Like I said, poor quality sources are far better on my plasma than any CRT I've used and I'm very picky about quality.

[Richard_G]

samijubal, regarding plasma/LCD: they can't display an unlimited number of colors and shades, they burn up highlights, block up shadows, and can't get neutral grays or skin tones correct. If none of that matters, then plasma has what you want, but it doesn't give me what I already have.

Today's Plasmas are capable of over a billion colors. Where are these analog sources that are such high quality? It's not VHS, cable, mini dishes, laserdiscs, all are flawed from the source. When you're talking about analog sources, nothing is anywhere near perfect anyway. Even my c-band satellite isn't perfect and it's far better than all the other sources I listed. Like I said, poor quality sources are far better on my plasma than any CRT I've used and I'm very picky about quality.

I agree totally and think sanlyn is living in the past (or the NTSC technology in the US hasn't caught up with the rest of the world). They used to be poor. I visiting friends at the weekend and they have a 3 year old LCD. The picture was just as you describe, highlights burnt out, shadows totally black and smearing with fast movement. Adjusting the contrast and brightness improved it but not a lot. My own 3 month old LCD however can display 64 million colours and has a refresh rate of 8mS. Result? A full tonal range of colours, no burning out of highlights or loss of detail in shadows, no smearing with movement and a picture that is far sharper than any CRT ever made!

Look at some current LCD and plasma displays and not the 'reduced because it's last years model' bargains. Reduced because it's last years model and because it's crap compared with the current one!

[Seeker47]

While they taketh away a nifty feature like PIP. Do any panels -- even the more expensive ones -- still offer this ?

Many VIZIO models provide PIP and POP (Two 4:3 images side by side). The remote even includes a button to swap the audio source; no more picture swapping for audio purposes.

It's like having two SDTV Monitors side by side.

Thanks for that info, davideck. It would be great if those features were also available on at least a few of the best flat panel models out there. Vizio may be the best of the bargain brands (I haven't been following them recently), but in the past I wasn't terribly impressed with their PQ. Still, if that older CRT went down for the count, I would definitely check out Vizio again, just for this reason.

[samijubal]

samijubal, regarding plasma/LCD: they can't display an unlimited number of colors and shades, they burn up highlights, block up shadows, and can't get neutral grays or skin tones correct. If none of that matters, then plasma has what you want, but it doesn't give me what I already have.

Today's Plasmas are capable of over a billion colors. Where are these analog sources that are such high quality? It's not VHS, cable, mini dishes, laserdiscs, all are flawed from the source. When you're talking about analog sources, nothing is anywhere near perfect anyway. Even my c-band satellite isn't perfect and it's far better than all the other sources I listed. Like I said, poor quality sources are far better on my plasma than any CRT I've used and I'm very picky about quality.

I agree totally and think sanlyn is living in the past (or the NTSC technology in the US hasn't caught up with the rest of the world). They used to be poor. I visiting friends at the weekend and they have a 3 year old LCD. The picture was just as you describe, highlights burnt out, shadows totally black and smearing with fast movement. Adjusting the contrast and brightness improved it but not a lot. My own 3 month old LCD however can display 64 million colours and has a refresh rate of 8mS. Result? A full tonal range of colours, no burning out of highlights or loss of detail in shadows, no smearing with movement and a picture that is far sharper than any CRT ever made!

Look at some current LCD and plasma displays and not the 'reduced because it's last years model' bargains. Reduced because it's last years model and because it's crap compared with the current one!

Flat panels also don't suffer from the convergence and geometry problems that all CRTs have. All these people that don't even own an HDTV trying to tell the people who do own one how bad they look need to get a clue. Watching movies, especially anamorphic widescreen movies that can take advantage of the higher resolution of HDTVs, or anything else for that matter, on a 4x3 CRT TV in no way compares to watching them on a 42" widescreen plasma. I can see many details in movies I could never see before because CRTs are just too small. I haven't watched VHS in years because it just looked too bad on any CRT I've got, but on the plasma it's fine and I've actually started watching tapes again.

[SingSing]

For viewing most movies and TV program, it is really difficult to tell the effect of resolution of LCD/Plasma/projection TVs. Our eyes mostly compared them on contrast and brightness.

Many of us have both projection TVs and flat panel TVs. We love them all, as long as they are BIG enough.

[sanlyn]

samijubal, regarding plasma/LCD: they can't display an unlimited number of colors and shades, they burn up highlights, block up shadows, and can't get neutral grays or skin tones correct. If none of that matters, then plasma has what you want, but it doesn't give me what I already have.

Today's Plasmas are capable of over a billion colors. Where are these analog sources that are such high quality? ...When you're talking about analog sources, nothing is anywhere near perfect anyway. ... Like I said, poor quality sources are far better on my plasma than any CRT I've used and I'm very picky about quality.

I agree totally and think sanlyn is living in the past (or the NTSC technology in the US hasn't caught up with the rest of the world). They used to be poor. I visiting friends at the weekend and they have a 3 year old LCD. The picture was just as you describe, highlights burnt out, shadows totally black and smearing with fast movement. Adjusting the contrast and brightness improved it but not a lot. My own 3 month old LCD however can display 64 million colours and has a refresh rate of 8mS. Result? A full tonal range of colours, no burning out of highlights or loss of detail in shadows, no smearing with movement and a picture that is far sharper than any CRT ever made!
...!

I disagree with both of you, and I think you've misunderstood me on a few points:

The figures I see for some plasma and even some newer LCD's is 1.07 billion colors. But let's say they have virtually unlimited colors, say 100 billion. I've stated this before -- whether the source and the display is video or audio, all digital devices are based on streams of rounded-down versions of whatever number the device started with. An original number and a rounded number are not the same number and not the same precision. There are digital mastering devices that record a video or audio element as a number up to (in some very high quality industrial equipment) 128 digits. There is no consumer-level DAC that will send a 128-digit number to your eyes and ears.

No, there is no such thing as a perfect analog or digital source. I've been looking at pro-grade stuff in the pro video departments of j&r and b&h in Manhattan, at WLIW studios in Garden City, NY; I am familiar with the digital photo gear at Hearst Publishing, and once kept up an email stream with an engineer at Telarc up to about 2002 when he retired. These people tell me, and my eyes and ears tell me, that there is no digital device that can compete with a first-class analog source or analog output device. The publishing industry still uses plain old color or b&w film as its primary mastering media, and many CD's are made from analog tape masters. If digital were "better", I'm certain those industries would have converted long ago.

Frankly, I can't afford any of the industrial-strength gear I've mentioned, whether digital or analog. But I have have heard and seen them, and digital is not as good.

So my two major points are these: (1) Digital a/v is an improvement in many respects. But I still don't think they're worth the price, and they still have problems to solve. (2) If you think high-quality digital a/v is in every way better than high-quality analog a/v, then by all means spend your $$ and enjoy yourselves. Digital has improved, but I still see and hear that a lot is missing in digital gear I plainly see and hear artifacts that my analog eyes and ears don't like.

Today I own 4 prosumer VCR's, 2 high-quality CRT's, 2 prosumer DVD recorders and one so-so CircuitCity DVD recorder, one BestBuy DVD player and one high-end DVD player, as well as a $3000 analog turntable, a high-end casette audio tape player (that's for the huge library of audio books we own and WILL NOT give up!), a high-end audio CD player, a high-end outboard audio DAC, 3 PC's built specifically for analog-to-digital conversion (all of which use analog-based capture cards because the later digital versions made everything look like crap) -- and just about every analog source I own has been in the processs of conversion to digital for the past 6 years.

But I still won't waste my money on today's LCD or plasma monitors. Even Richard G's refresh rate of 8ms seems a bit slow (my PC's LCD has 2ms, and it still smears motion. I believe Rich means response time, not refresh rate). The "sharpness" many refer to with flat panels is artificial edge sharpening, which is almost always overdone, with a lot of detail missing between the edges. I give give 'em five more years. By then, every digital set in use today will be obsolete. Some bright people overseas will come up with new ways to handle those numbers, and they will be improvements. When digital monitors can match or better what I have now, I'll be one of the first in line. But digital flat panels ain't there yet.

[Seeker47]

. . .
3 PC's built specifically for analog-to-digital conversion (all of which use analog-based capture cards because the later digital versions made everything look like crap

Which capture cards ? (Just curious, for personal reference. So far, the most common recommendations I see here -- citing currently available ones -- seem to be the Hauppauge models, such as the 250 or 350. But you are likely referring to some that are older.) Can you be more specific as to why ?

[edDV]

...
So my two major points are these: (1) Digital a/v is an improvement in many respects. But I still don't think they're worth the price, and they still have problems to solve. (2) If you think high-quality digital a/v is in every way better than high-quality analog a/v, then by all means spend your $$ and enjoy yourselves. Digital has improved, but I still see and hear that a lot is missing in digital gear I plainly see and hear artifacts that my analog eyes and ears don't like.

I'm curious what your source video is?

As you probably know, the pros avoid your issues with 10, 12 or 14 bit acquisition.

Consumer camcorders, DVD and broadcast transmission are usually 8bit.

Where are you getting full analog source? Even a BetacamSP camcorder outputs through a 9 bit TBC.