42" Plasma TV £887.07 incl VAT and incl Delivery !!

Berwhale

Rave wrote:

All plasmas, LCD TVs, projectors etc. have to run a progressive signal at a basic display level, so they all have built in de-interlacers. Doing this in the DVD player rather than the display probably gives better results, admittedly.

The Samsung DVD player I have uses the excellent Faroudja upscaling algorithms to resize the image. It's definately better than the scaler built into the plasma.

Also, DVDs can be encoded in 5 different 'panel' resolutions with 10 different bit rates, they can also be PAL or NTSC encoded and interlaced or not. Basically, all DVDs are definately not the same. To get the best picture quality you need to look for 'Superbit' editions of the DVDs with high resolution transfers using the highest bit rates (all the capacity of the DVD is used for the movie, rather than multiple language tracks and extras).

Anyway, back on topic, this is irrelevant if you buy the plasma in the thread title.

nealgs

unfortunately the saying 'You get what you pay for' most definately still applies with regard to buying plasma/LCD screens.

Cheap does definately not mean good quality - check out these two links for info regarding cheap plasma...

http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=185630

http://www.avforums.com/forums/showthread.php?t=180302

berwhale - From what i've read I was under the impression that the actual resolution of a DVD is 720x480 for NTSC and 720x576(or so) for PAL is it not - anything with higher resolution played on current DVD players wouldn't be display - Superbit DVD's are just better encoded with less compression (higher bitrates for video/audio) than normal DVD's not higher resolution (i.e. an increase in horizontal and/or vertical pixel counts) ?????

I also have an upscaling DVD player (Momitsu v880N) that upscales through component, currently outputting 720p @ 60hz - and image quality is definately improved over normal 480i/576i(?) output

regards
Gary

Repo

You can't judge quality purely on resolution alone. The Panasonic 852x480 panels are streets ahead in terms of build and picture quality than many other suppliers HD panels...

And... so many people have SD panels that it would be commercial suicide for broadcasters to not support SD panels considering the reinvestments costs of these customers replacing with HD panels despite what Sky might have said.

Berwhale

Repo wrote:

You can't judge quality purely on resolution alone. The Panasonic 852x480 panels are streets ahead in terms of build and picture quality than many other suppliers HD panels...

You're correct, it's generally the quality of the component and interface boards that are fitted to the plasma that affect the picture quality the most. It's manufactures like Panasonic and Pioneer who tend to make the best component boards.

However, given the choice between decent screens with good quality boards, you'd be silly not to go for one with HD capabilities.

I think the introduction of the HDMI/DVI digital connection is actually more important than the higher resolution. My Hitachi looks considerably better through the HDMI/DVI connection than through component video (which is already much better than SCART or S-Video).

If anyone is interested in researching this more thoroughly, AVForums is definately the best place to look (see nealgs links above).

Repo wrote:

And... so many people have SD panels that it would be commercial suicide for broadcasters to not support SD panels considering the reinvestments costs of these customers replacing with HD panels despite what Sky might have said.

Who said that broadcasters will not support standard definition plasmas?