High-Def TVs?

Dave, what you've observed is ABSOLUTELY correct, as is your conclusion. The standard-definition picture looks bad on the set you describe . . . because this set has a bad picture. And unfortuneately, this is the case with most new TVs, of any technology.

Whether or not they look great with a high-definition picture is irrelevant . . . if you were shopping for new speakers, and they only sounded good on SACDs, but worse than your current pair on CDs, would you buy them? With a good HD source, it's easy to make a television look good . . . just like if you had a Studer A-80 reel-to-reel playing Tape Project reels as a source, you could make some pretty modest amps and speakers sound amazing.

It seems that the market for TVs these days is much like mass-market stereo receivers in the early 1970s -- major wars going on between big Asian companies for market dominance. The major target for their efforts are middle-class males, who have an insatiable appetite for armchair technical analysis and a cheap price tag. Hence, if you want the biggest numbers and most acronyms for the lowest price, it's a buyer's market.

But the intelligent way to buy a television is the same way one would shop for audio . . . bring in your own media on DVD, and compare the picture quality to what you already have at home.

Al, that would make sense if the main picture-quality bottleneck for SD programming was its native resolution . . . but that's not the case. Pristene-quality NTSC video is actually quite stunning, it's just that the common modes of consumer delivery (analog broadcast, analog cable, and compressed digital QAM from cable and DBS services) make quite a mess of it. A typical mid-1980s high-end video setup was an 8' diagonal screen with a Kloss Novabeam projector . . . such a system with an analog C-band satellite feed could easily embarass anything in Best Buy playing HD.

Here are what I see as some of the biggest picture quality problems with consumer TVs:

7. Poor viewing angle - this continues to be a problem with most RP and LCD technologies. RPs still frequently have poor corner focus as well.

6. Excessive luminance peaking - the classic "sharpness control" set too high, causing lots of noise

5. Non-linear grey scale - LCDs typically have problems at the black end, all technologies seem to have problems at the white end, mostly processing/calibration related

4. Grey-scale linearity doesn't match between each color

3. Color balance is usually WAY, WAY off

2. De-interlacing artifacts

1. POOR SCALING ALGORITHMS!!! Really, there's no excuse here, just corner-cutting. It's interesting how many of them have noise issues that are amplified by common MPEG compression.

All of these issues (except for #1 somewhat, and sometimes #6) exist for BOTH standard and high-definition broadcasts. It's simply that with HD, the source is that much better to start with, so most people don't notice it as much.

Ah, yes. There were some wonderful CRT sets made as a lovely swan song to what became a very well-developed technology. A similar thing happened a few years prior with CRT projectors . . . the 9" Barcos were truly stunning.

I think the main problem with continuing to manufacture high-end CRT sets was the availability of high-quality picture tubes . . . widescreen tubes are very costly and have a high rejection rate, and all picture tubes have some pretty nasty chemicals inside that make RoHS compliance very difficult.