Flat Screen conspiracy?
 

I mentioned in another posting (about the old radio I gave my grandparnets for Christmas) that I'd recently been in a Circuit City.

Naturally, I looked around a bit in the TV section to see the "latest and greatest" in disposable flatware from China. I also noticed they were down to just a handful of CRT sets, all of them 27" or less I think.

Since they were all on the same feed, I started looking back/forth between them and the LCDs/Plasmas/DLPs. It occured to me that these remaining CRT sets had some of the WORST picture quality I've ever seen! No wonder the masses are rejecting CRTs like cancer!

Lots of color bleeding, bad convergence, sharpness turned way down.

So I ask...

Do you think Cicuit City/Worst Buy, etc. are mis-adjusting those cheaper sets, just so they don't show up the more expen$ive flat screens? OR Just the fact that the only CRT sets they had on display were crapola brands like Funai, Apex, Lucky-Panda-Puke or whatever?

I'm guessing that it's not intentional, these things just suck out of the box, although I'm sure there is no special effort made to adjust them.

I recently made the arguement to some co-workers who were talking about new sets that CRTs still produce the best picture quality. They looked at me like I was on crack! After doing the same side-by-side comparison, I can see why they would.

If I had money & time to burn, I'd love to build a Chromacolor II set into the wall at a store, and hang the mask from a flatscreen around it. It would be funny to see how many people wanted to buy that one. :scratch2:

I look at the craze of flat screen shoppers as an opportunity to obtain great stuff for next to nothing. I just bought a 19" flat screen CRT ViewSonic monitor at the GW. It was in perfect condition and works great. One of the best 12$ I have spent in a while. I also got a 17" syncmaster in the same condition for $5 at another TS. I don't need a TV but am seeing CRT TVs for a song.

Last time i shopped for a TV at best circuit shitty they told me they don't have digital feeds going to the CRT's hence it was all snowy and crap.

Have Yet to see a flat screen look as good as a CRT. But I have yet to find a 35" CRT that I can mount to my wall...

Ugh... Hopefully you'll do a better job than the recent install I saw.

It was a Sony Bravia (DLP, right?) Must admit, it had a very nice picture. BUT...

It was mounted to the wall on some kind of swing-out bracket, with all the cables and junk zip-tied to the metal frame. Naturally, the guy had the TV about three feet from his face! Beneath it was a DVD, PS3, cable box, and several other unknown boxes of crap. It was sooo ugly I wanted to sneak a cameraphone shot just to post it here.

Swear-to-gawd, it looked like the evil robocop had punched a hole through the wall and at the end of his arm was a TV set!

All the cables will be routed out of site when its done. Not to mention the appropriate mounting bracket will be used. Mounting a 100 pound tv on the wall with a swivel bracket sound dangerous and wont be allowed in my house full of kids.

I don't think these people have a clue as to how to adjust a picture.They are probably left to the default settings that are setby the manufactures and don't care what they look like.Why would they bother,those are not the hot selling items.
As long as I've been associated with this hobby,the majority of people do not have a idea what picture quality is.Contrast blown all the way up...color temps in the nether regions...
CRTs can produce stunning images if one knows what to adjust.The vast majority of sets sold in the past were mal adjusted by the manufacture right out of the gate.I don't know if manufatures are doing the same with plasmas,lcds,dlps etc.Some of the plasmas look quite good.But,their contrast ratios aren't close to that of a crt.

Last time I went to Rat Shack, There were NO CRT's only flat screen LCD's there! I was looking for a bargain 27" CRT for the bedroom.

Most of the new sets I see out of the box look ok, but put it on the sales floor where everyone can adjust on it and it is no wonder the picture is bad.

Bill R

Some of the newer RCA crt sets made in China even have the middle of tint range which is usually the default far too green.I find they always look better if I adjust towards red and turn down the color some. Way too much color at mid setting(default).I was able to adjust one to match a mid 90s RCA but at the default settings it looked like crap especially with the green people.I've seen several of the same model(2005 model year) that looked exactly the same so it wasn't a set fault,it's the way it was designed(set up) from the factory.

I have seen a few flat lcd tv's that were incredible. One looked so good I wanted to reach in and eat whatever it was on the screen. However, then the salesguy told me that I would need a maintenence program just to keep it going. Uh, I just want to plug it in and watch it for 10 or 15 years. He said that was unlikely to happen. :smoke:

LCD s and Plasmas both have a limited lifespan. I too will hold on to the CRTs I have and after that I'll hit the thrifts and flea market and then after that it won't matter because..........gulp!

Sounds like they wanted to sell you the maintenance program. That's one of their biggest money makers. I don't know about plasmas, but LCDs are very reliable.

But is the reliability relative? If I pay 1000-1500 bucks for something, I would like to get more than 3-4 good years out of it. If I only used it for movies, then it might last longer, but we use ours for everything from games to movies to Rachel Ray. If the projector bulbs are 250 bucks and I need one every couple of years, I really can't even afford to own one. I'm really just asking, I don't know.

I would like to get a big screen, it is one of my near future goals, but I am really leary. When I spend a grand on something; that is a really big deal in my world.

I was just there today, the store had a total of four smallish LCDs and two IDENTICAL, but different mold Funai-made DVD players at a $20 difference (Philco was cheaper than Sylvania). The GW next door to the RS had a 2002 36" JVC (bland set) for $100. Luckily the GW got their act together after the holidays; no wait, it's that time of the year.

About Best Buy, I had a gift card from Christmas so I forced myself to walk through the store, nothing's setup correctly for the CRT sets, the DLP, LCD, and Plasma sets had its color saturation cranked up and the lighting is slightly dimmer than the CRT section.

There's a good reason why people want LCD's - LCD TV's now cost LESS than CRT's for the same sizes. Above 32", they're much cheaper - you can get a Syntax-Olevia (the best of the off-brands - side-by-side, they were comparable to a high-end LG offering) 37" LCD TV for $800. A CRT would be more expensive.

The reason for this is simple: To increase a 20" CRT to a 40" CRT with double the vertical and horizontal resolution, the electron gun would have to scan four times as fast and be able to turn on and off four times as fast, with a four-fold increase in precision necessary. To be able to properly hit the screen, it would need to either be further away from the screen, or be at a much steeper angle - further increasing complexity.

On the other hand, you can pretty much make a 40" LCD out of four 20" LCDs joined at the edges.

As a side note, only plasmas are today known for a high degree of problems - and even then, five-year-old plasmas still look quite good today. LCDs are based off of a normal liquid-crystal panel (which, if left in one place, should last for at least ten years - laptop LCDs from 1996 still work today!), and the backlights are actually just a form of flourescent bulb - they've been around for a long, long, long time.

That said, you'll all be wanting the new flat-screen technology called FED. It's a technology from the 90's that produced amazing picture quality, but cost a fortune to make. However, carbon nanotubes can drop the price signifigantly.

http://www.technologyreview.com/NanoTech/17824/

It's really just a bunch of really tiny electron guns, each pointed at a seperate pixel. All the benifits of CRT without the pesky scanning and annoying electromagnets. (Goodbye de-gauss button!)

That said, I'm going to continue my hunt for a 21" flat-glass CRT monitor for my next PC. Mmmm....monitor-a-licious!

That's not true. CRT size has nothing to do with resolution. A 40" CRT just spreads the same number of lines over a larger area. The main problem with large CRTs is the weight from the thick glass.

Some current cheap CRT sets are pretty bad. I've seen poor geometry, poor convergence, poor focus and blooming/bleeding on bright scenes. Some of these may benefit from adjustment (if can work out the service menu without the probably nonexistant service manual), others are just bad/cheap design (poorly power supply regulation, etc).

However they are not all bad. Considering how bad the picture looks on some of the LCD and plasma sets I've seen it wouldn't surprise me that stores were intentional misadjusting the remaining CRT sets to make them look worse.

I will be sticking with CRT for as long as I can. I have seen a couple of nice plasma sets, but as they only look that good under ideal conditions (digital source preferably at the panel's native resolution) they are just too limiting for me.

As a side note some recent LCD rear projection sets are starting to hit the curbs around here. I passed on a Toshiba that needed a new bulb after reading various reports that the $400+ bulbs only last a couple of years.

There are plenty of bad CRTs out there. Those "slim fit" CRTs look pretty bad. Also, even the best CRTs can't do a very good job when the contrast is at maximum. Every TV I see in a store is blooming and defocusing from the strain. Even AK favorites like the Chromacolor II would look like crap if they were adjusted to match the brightness of the sets on display at best buy.

I've come to the conclusion that there's no perfect video display. CRTs look excellent when they are adjusted properly and if you are lucky enough to get one with perfect convergence. There's always some geometry error. At high brightness all CRTs lose a lot of focus. They're heavy, big and can't be made bigger than about 40".

The blacks are very good on most modern plasmas (this used to be a serious problem with plasmas). Color saturation is good and they don't suffer from motion blur. You can make them as bright as you want without having the picture go out of focus. Convergence and geometry are always perfect. Plasmas have trouble showing continuous shades (they appear as bands, or as areas of flickering dots). They are also very fragile and they are more complex to repair.

LCDs have most of the same advantages and disadvantages as plasmas, but I find that the colors usually look soft and washed out. They also always suffer from some motion blur. This is much better on the best LCDs, but there are a lot of smaller cheap LCDs out there. LCDs have poor blacks which change with viewing angle. They also have a limited dynamic range which makes it easy to clip the whites if you turn up the contrast too high. LCDs are proven to be very reliable and when the back light wears out, it can (in theory) be replaced.

If you really want the best HDTV you can get, look for a Sony direct view with "super fine pitch". They have much finer phosphor stripes on the CRT than any other TV so they can display better resolution. The CRT is a lot like what you'd find in a professional monitor. I think they have been discontinued, but there are still some in stores at a reduced price. If it doesn't say "super fine pitch" it just has a regular CRT.

We have a 30" Sony Wega HDTV and the picture is simply mahvelous dahlings and at the time it was half the price of the LCD and Plasma stuff.
Just don't ask me to pick it up.
Rob

From what I have read in various magazines (including the IEEE Spectrum magazine) plasma is the least reliable and has the shortest life of any of the currently available flat panel displays.

From the same IEEE Spectrum article discussing flat panel displays, I have come to the conclusion that none of them will be as reliable as the CRTs in the short term(and possibly long term). This is due to the complexity built into them.

I have also read that for the HDTV aspect ratio, it is almost impossible to build a single CRT set as the CRT yield is very poor. At present, if you want both a good picture and long life for HDTV, the heavy projection CRT sets are your choice(at least as long as they are produced).

True, but the latest generation of sets use a resolution much, much higher than older TVs - even HDTVs.. 1080p has half again more lines of resolution than 720p, and each line has half again more pixels in it, which means that the electron gun has to scan 2.25x as fast to maintain the same number of frames per second.

Also, LCD TVs have some advantages over CRTs, especially in brightness. For the "best of the best", you need to look at some high-end (albiet smaller) LCDs made by NEC and other high-end companies, which have almost no ghosting at all with contrast and brightness far better than most large CRTs.

Besides, I've yet to see a 37" CRT for $750. Show me that, and I'll concede.

So, should I buy that 36" Sony WEGA CRT for $999?

From what I read, the real issue with LCD tvs is the backlight. I have read that they last between 3 and 8 years with average use and are fairly expensive to replace.

However, if I was forced to go by a flat screen TV at present, I would choose LCD. Plasma seems to have a very short life and DLP sounds too much like the "CBS color wheel" system that was abandoned for good reason in the 1950s

the dlps i have serviced have got the color wheel whine. can hear them 20 feet away. color wheels costs wholesale rca $150.00 bulb from $250.00 to $360.00 wholesale. you dont leave these sets running 24/7. they will cost you out the ass. and the color wheels are small and the bearings dry up in the bulb heat spinning at 7200rpm.