[QUOTE=Merijeek]
But if I goto my local store, they’re going to have playing whatever they have playing, and it looks like everything is running off of one or two feeds.
So, how do I accomplish what you suggest?
-Joe
[/QUOTE]
Some stores round here allow you to bring in a DVD and play it on whatever display you’re interested in. Of course you then have to have the cheek to walk out of the store and buy the display somewhere else where it will probably be cheaper.
[QUOTE=Usram]
Some stores round here allow you to bring in a DVD and play it on whatever display you’re interested in. Of course you then have to have the cheek to walk out of the store and buy the display somewhere else where it will probably be cheaper.
[/QUOTE]
This is a good suggestion. We brought my wife’s laptop with us to Bestbuy to try out several units. We checked LCD and Plasma, we had already ruled out DLP for size constraints. We were testing both VGA and S-video. S-Video looked bad on all of them. VGA looked good, but not as good as the DVI connection that I have now.
I guess I was that cheeky however, when I finally made my decision, I went with Crutchfield over Bestbuy. In my defense, it was 10 days later, the local Bestbuy had sold out, and Crutchfield had free shipping and a better return policy.
Jim
If you’re going to be using cable, get a TV with a CableCARD slot. Many large screen sets have them now (it has to be a TV, though, not a monitor), and it obviates the need for an additional piece of equipment in your system. Your cable company should be able to rent you the card, and it’s usually a lot cheaper than a set-top box.
If you live near a major city, or have a decent rooftop antenna, you’d be surprised how many HD channels you can get for free. Satellite HD transmissions are compressed, and AFAIK so is cable, so potentially the picture may look worse than over-the-air (OTA.) Maybe you won’t always have cable. Your cable provider may or may not provide all the local stations in HD. Over-the-air HD is higher than DVD quality, it’s quite beautiful.
All digital content (except music CDs) is compressed, no matter what the delivery medium. There simply isn’t enough bandwidth to stream uncompressed HD video. A quick calculation tells me that uncompressed 1080i video would require about 178 megabytes per second. Multiply that by the number of channels and you see where the problem lies…
It is possible that cable channels are compressed more than OTA, but that’s up to the cable company or network.
[QUOTE=Merijeek]
But if I goto my local store, they’re going to have playing whatever they have playing, and it looks like everything is running off of one or two feeds.
So, how do I accomplish what you suggest?
-Joe
[/QUOTE]
You are going into a store to drop a thousand or 2 on a TV. Tell the sales people you need to try a few different formats on the TV to make sure it works correctly. If they don’t agree go to another store until they do.
[QUOTE=Usram]
The TV doesn’t do the decompression. It’s the cable/satellite/DTV boxes that do that, and they all do it equally well, because MPEG-2 decompression is the same regardless of where the data came from. What makes a difference is the quality of compression. Some channels compress the data more than others, depending on how much data their bandwidth allows them to send, and even with the most expensive equipment, the more you compress MPEG-2 the worse it looks. There is nothing your TV or cable box can do about that.
However, the video processors in displays, which allow them to do things such as displaying interlaced 480 video on a progressive display that has 768 lines, are not all equal. Some are better at converting SD (480 or 576) to HD, some are better at converting interlaced to progressive.
[/QUOTE]
The TV does the decompression if you feed a signal directly into it. Mpeg decompression is not that same regardless of where the data comes from. The level of compression is choosenby the people providing the signal, just like when storing a jpeg photo. They can also play around with other parameters. The more compression, the more compression artifacts.
Yeah that’s why I said decompression is the same. There are various things that can affect quality on the compression side, but once it is compressed the result of decompressing it is fixed.