Jan 31 2005
TVs, and the biggening thereof
Ok, so ‘biggening’ isn’t technically a word, but whatever.
I bought my 78cm TV waaaay back, I guess around 1998. You know, back when a set bigger than 68cm was considered home theatre. It’s a Mitsubishi Diva, one of the last of the all-analogue sets, nearly as heavy as I am and lacking a 16:9 mode, but it’s still capable of giving a very good picture. I first noticed them during a home show, and what immediately drew me in was the colour, which was very natural for a Japanese set (most of which look dreadful for reasons I’ll explain).
Anyhow, I was over at my sister’s last night, and she’d just bought a widescreen 76cm LG with vouchers from work, ended up costing her about $700 out-of-pocket. Not too shabby, and it even has component input. I started to feel bad about my old dinosaur set… until I started playing a DVD.
The nice way to describe the picture would be ’substandard’, but I’ll be honest and say it was shocking. The contrast was ramped right up, making the picture bloom and lose any kind of detail.. which is why the sharpness control was on and cranked way too high. The colour was set high enough to make skintones look like the actors had been rolling in Burger Rings, but the worst problem was the horrible posterisation, which gave the entire image the qualities of a 4th generation VHS dub - the ‘molten wax’ look on cheeks and foreheads.
Naturally I started fiddling:
- First I turned the sharpness right off - the ’sharpness’ isn’t real detail, it’s high frequency noise added by the set to try and add solid edges to a bad VHS or broadcast image. Using it obliterates fine detail in your image.
- Next, I turned the contrast down to a sane level. In this case, I took it from 100% to about 55%. I still wasn’t happy with the amount of bloom I was seeing, but it looks like the tube or the electronics simply aren’t good enough to produce a filmlike image.
- I then turned to the colour. Japanese consumer manufacturers traditionally set their colour temperature (which determines how the colour white appears) far too high, pushing white towards the blue end of the spectrum. This makes the picture look ‘exciting’ under showroom lights, but makes it impossible to get a natural image at home. The designers then try to compensate by setting their colour extremely red, which makes skin tones unnatural. The easy way to tell how well a set reproduces colour is to check the skin of a black actor - a bad set will make brown skin verge towards purple, no matter what you do with the colour setting. I chose my own set based on its ability to adjust colour temperature from stupidly high down (12,000-14,000K) to standard (6500K, the colour of white in daylight).
After this adjustment, the picture was becoming tolerable, but not something I’d be proud of. I checked some closeups of Andy Serkus’s face on the Australian Return of the King DVD through the 16:9 component input. My own set produced better colour and detail on the US disc (which, being NTSC instead of PAL, contains 100 less lines), even when the DVD player was dropping 33% of the vertical resolution to make up for the set’s inability to show an anamorphic image. Anyhow, my sister is happy, and that’s all that matters.
All this was a long buildup to say that I want a projector. The new Sony LCD is looking promising, and at $4500 street price is actually pretty reasonable (after all, I paid $3500 for my CRT set years ago). When I’ve paid off some debts, I’ll start comparing different models and working out how much I’ll need to pay for a decent screen.
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