Are You Happy With Your HDTV Purchase?

[arwalden]

Did you decide on an HGTV tube... or plasma... or projection LCD? Are you happy with it?

I almost had a 34" widescreen HGTV (CRT) delivered today, unfortunately BestBuy could not deliver as promised, so I canceled the order rather than waiting ANOTHER five days.

I'm disappointed (a little)... but, this is an opportunity to rethink my decision to buy a tube over a projection HGTV.

All the online hype is confusing at best, so some first-hand experience from you would be appreciated.

QUESTION: I've heard that fast moving scenes tend to get blocky and pixelized on plasma and LCD projection screens (which is why I chose the tube). Is this true? If so, is it noticeable and annoying enough to make you wish you had purchased something else?

Thanks, all!

-- Allen

[Deja Q]

1. Well, plasma/LCD are the worst...

despite using little energy, displaying a 100% accurate image (no distortion on the edges) and costing 5 times more...

The backscreen projection types are nice but fade out from certain distances or angles.

The CRT tube type is the best, I think...

[Dookus]

2. I have a CRT HDTV...

and I love it, love it, love it.

Alas, my local cable company is STILL not broadcasting in HD, but it's great for watching DVD's and playing Xbox games.

[sir_captain]

3. I have an LCD front projector

made by Panasonic and it's amazingly awesome. The picture on my pull down screen is six feet wide. Awesome.

On the other hand, CRT will always have the truest colors and blackest blacks. They just can't get nearly as big as projection and are super heavy.

I am categorically against rear-projection tvs (not very high quality, imho) and am not big on plasma either (they reduce in brightness by about 50% over the course of a year of use. The next few years will see bigger and cheaper flat LCD displays, which I expect to be very good.

Right now, though, the absolutel best price:quality value is in LCD/DLP front projection. I paid about $1000 for my projector, and it's literally the best $1000 I've ever spent.

[scubadude]

4. 30 inch Phillips tube wide-screen HDTV ready

The HDTV is provided by the cable company for $5/mo for the tuner. There are only about 7 HDTV channels but more should be added soon. If you want to pay more, you can buy the movie channels HDTV, but seeing that we don't watch TV all that much we don't subscribe.

The picture is astounding. Way better than standard. Way better than progressive scan DVDs. If you don't have the tuner, you don't have HDTV. It is that much better. It's almost like looking through a window. Now that's with a rather small HDTV. The 1050 lines of resolution make individual pixels invisible. If it were a 60 inch, then they may be visible...

Another nice thing about it is that you can fit more of the wide screen DVD picture in, although you do end up with black bands on the top and bottom for content provided in really wide aspect ratios greater than 16*9.

The only thing bad about it is that sometimes the "HDTV" programming is stretched. This is annoying.

So, if your going small tube, do it wide-screen.

Scuba