If money is no object, get the LED LCD TVs and make sure it has a feature called "local dimming."

Just four hours ago I sprung for a Samsung 8500

It is quite expensive, but based on input from a person who I consider to be the ultimate expert on this subject, as well as my own research over at the AVS Forum (which you MUST visit to get advice on your purchase), this was absolutely, clearly the set to get for my particular purposes.

I can see the difference. Just look at the difference between a LCD 120hz vs a LED. The colors are better, the blacks are better and there seems to be hardly any artifacts or tearing on the edges during movement. For sports and active movement in the content, it looks better. The LCD's also might have a bit more side viewing (not on center) quality.

On the other hand......case in point:

I have a friend that's happy with the "in store" brand LCD 60 hz. He watches rock concerts and is as happy as a clam.

I suppose you could pick up a cheaper LCD 60hz 720p now, save your money and then when the LED's come down upgrade.

@ John Meyer:

What do you have to "feed" that nice TV??

Here I use a Mac Mini Core 2 Duo (the size was ordered by my wife) with 4 GB and Win 7 - and it plays MPEG2 720p from the server on the 1 Gb house net on our 50" Samsung through the RGB port.
Test showed that the RGB port gave the best result.
I let the TVset do the upscaling.

But I am migrating to 1080i - and experiments show that the Mac Mini could be overloaded.... so looking for advice.

the blacks are better
Isn't that mostly a function of the panel?

If there is light hitting the face of the monitor then you will get glare. Some displays will reflect more light than others.

Ritsmer, Me too.
Trying to advise daughter and son-in-law as their house build progresses(they are techno dinosaurs). Their electrician is a common or garden "cable puller', so no help there.
Any suggestions what cables to install to their TV point as after construction there is no access. Free to air TV and satellite of course. Will cat 6 be ok for later net feeds? ie a 1gig network. Any other ideas?
Brian

We got a new house 6 years ago - and were lucky to get the new "Intelligent House control system" built in - see: http://www.schneider-electric.co.uk/electricity.nsf/electrical-distribution/smart-home-systems/delta-8-vdi-solution

At building time I ordered plenty of the multi purpose wall plugs (RJ45 type) - most of them even the twin type - but today I could use more...

However - the key piece is a panel with connections to all rooms - and there I can switch telephones, TVsignals, cable TV and up to 1 Gb data through the cables to all the rooms.

I do not know the specifications of the mile++ cables built in to our walls - but 6 years ago they probably were shielded cat 5e - and I was positively surprised that they could carry 1 Gb data well over 30 meters.
I do not use the original router - but a 16 channel 3com router which does the job well.
The TV signals are put through coax-to-RJ45 intermediate cables at the panel - and in the rooms through RJ45-to coax with no quality loss - it seems. They carry both analogue and digital TV signals - and FM for our radios too.

If the cat 6 or better are payable today I would go for them - you never know about the demands of future signals....

I picked up the same set johnmeyer. Finally got rid of the 720p set I had.

I will say this about the Samsung. The quality of the image is very much tied to the quality of the source material. It does not do 480i very well. Very blocky with a strong screendoor effect.

1080p content looks very good. Black levels are better than any LCD set I have seen, but it can be a bit inconsistent based on what the image content is.

Example. If you have a really high contrast image with a lot of white in it, it will tend to brighten the blacks in that zone. Most of the time it is hardly noticeable though, unless you are looking for it.

The stock speakers are lacking as well. Nothing new there. I went ahead and took a chance and bought a Canton CD90SB speaker. It does a better job than I expected when used in conjunction with sub-woofers and not sending the low frequencies to it. Highs are crisp. Mids are clear.

The backlighting is an array of white LEDs that are dimmed depending on the average luma for that part of the image hence the "local dimming". I doubt there's one LED per pixel though.

Bob.

None of the LED backlit or edgelit LCD's televisions use a one LED to one pixel ratio.

Samsung has done a remarkable job with overcoming most of the issues with edge lighting. Side by side it stacks well with the Sony Bravia LED backlit sets, but for a lot less money.

With good source material and a good calibration, it is like looking out a window. The image is really quite amazing.

Given the Samsung price, I would be tempted to buy a Panasonic 54 " v10 plasma and save $1600
or spend the same money and get a 65" Panasonic v10

By the way, late Jan through Feb is usually a good time to buy a tv since, they announce the new models at the CES show in early January and want to move last years models, particulary the not very high end. The low model TVs start rolling out around March with the higher end ones coming later in the year.

Well, I got the TV delivered, and I do not like it AT ALL.

This is my first non-CRT television (yes, I do live in the stone age). The reason I held off so long is that I knew that SD material would not look very good. However, I always figured I'd be smart enough to do something about it.

Well, I'm not very smart, because I can't do anything about it. How do all of you live with such horrible looking SD video? Why can't LCD's display interlaced material natively? Why can't they scale the video and preserve at least some of the detail? All I get is clayface, fuzzy mush. Absolutely pathetic.

However, that is not the biggest problem. The BIG problem is that if you feed composite video to this set (for my legacy DVD, laserdisc, and SD satellite material) and run the audio through the home theater amp (all of this is analog -- nothing digital and no signal processing in the HT amp), the audio and video are WAY out of sync !!

I have played extensively with the processing settings on the set, turning off as much of the stuff as possible, but the A/V sync is still really bad. Completely unwatchable.

I went to the Samsung site and entered "audio sync" into the FAQ/Knowledgebase engine for this set, and the first hit acknowledges that this set will not properly sync analog audio and video, and say, plainly and bluntly, that there isn't anything you can do about this.

So, if you have any legacy A/V material you want to watch, don't get this set.

After Christmas, this set will be going back to Best Buy. I will be $4,400 richer ($4,050 + tax, etc.), but I will no longer have a large TV. This may be a signal that it is time for me to do something else. It definitely takes the fun out of a decade of work to no longer be able to display it and have it look really good. I am 100% totally bummed.

Use only HDMI with this set. Lose all that analog crap.

Use only HDMI with this set. Lose all that analog crap.

Great idea, but what am I supposed to do with my laserdisc, VHS tapes, etc.? Never watch them again, ever?

What connections do you use for the LD and VHS? As there is no S-Video and only one component and one composite connection along with the 4 HDMI ports.

I have my Pioneer CLD-97a connected to a S-video input on my Yamaha amp which converts to HDMI and scales it up. Looks pretty nice.

I have long since migrated all my VHS tapes to DVD.


By the way, 480i content over HDMI still looks pretty bad on this set. Several channels on DiSH network have yet to go to full native HD content.

" This may be a signal that it is time for me to do something else. It definitely takes the fun out of a decade of work to no longer be able to display it and have it look really good. I am 100% totally bummed."

A someone who spends hours having to listen to someone extol the virtues of quad all I can say and with the best of intents is this. Get over it and move on. The past is history and only meant for academics reading mouldy tomes in the dank basements of libraries.

Recently you posted a scene from The Third Man. I watched it and I was blown away. Simply brilliant. Then I watched it and listened to it a few more times. I started to think about it. By todays standards it's terrible. The rear projection is bad, the audio is horrible. So I thought of a mind game. How would we react to the movie if we changed only the stock loaded into the camera to Kodak's latest and processed it accordingly.
I think we forgive the sins of the past, it always looks rosier back then even in B&W because there's such a level of detachment.
I find the WWII footage that was shot in color plain wierd to watch. I wasn't born back then so my mind's view of WWI and WWII is black and white. Wierd how our brains work. It seems like it was an alien event until I see some of the events in color.
I have great memories accumulate during my life. I've gone back to revist some of the movies I watched many times back then and it's a bad trip. No denying the genius and craft that went into them but I cannot get the thought out of my head how much better and relevant they'd be if they were shot with the latest kit.
There's another side to this that interests me. I wonder how future generations will view our legacy. We're pretty close to the limits of perception and digital doesn't fade, colors don't shift and grain is busted.

Bob.

I wonder what they are donig inside these sets with this sync problem?

I own a Samsung LCD 52" 1080p
Love the picture from my HD directv signal and blu-ray player.
However I also have an audio sync problem.
I took composite video out from the set and feed that into another LCD monitor (out in my back yard) along with an anolog audio feed and the darn audio is completely out of sync from the video.

I wish I could get them lined up some how......

Ted

"This may be a signal that it is time for me to do something else. It definitely takes the fun out of a decade of work to no longer be able to display it and have it look really good. I am 100% totally bummed."Say it ain't so! You're my hero! I always look forward to your posts because the projects you undertake, your analytical approach to problem solving and ability to clearly articulate the solution are a model for all to follow. I'm sure there's a solution to this dilemna that will be acceptable - maybe enjoy the Samsung for its HD digital capabilities while maintaining a CRT for the legacy media while gradually converting the analog to digital???

...Jerry

I did read about the Samsung set (forgot how big) that it had 960 LED backlights and over 2 million LCD thingys. I don't have any sync problems with my old fastioned Sony XBR2 and XBR6.
JJK

After your post, I looked at this TV and one of the review sites I saw mentioned poor SD quality, but nothing about audio sync. Check out this thread.
http://www.avforums.com/forums/lcd-led-lcd-televisions/910302-how-correct-sound-ouput-out-sync-audio-output-samsung-le-xxa6-series-2.html

Not knowing your standards of SD, I looked up a review of the Panasonic V10 plasma
SD quality is almost similar to SD quality on G10. Panasonic has still not fixed the de-interlacing issues which means that fine details disappear – for example pin-stripes on suits. The overall quality of SD is nice, though, primarily because of the THX profile that provides a very accurate gamma and nice colours. This combined with deep blacks and the overall quality of the plasma-panel in V10, makes SD nice to watch – but not perfect.

Here's what they said about the G10
.....SD (standard definition) reproduction is one of the G10 series’ strengths. It beats the vast majority of TVs on the market. The picture is beautiful, crisp and very natural. I saw minimal noise in the picture.

I've borrowed several LCD projectors over the years (I have a 10 foot screen in the viewing room) and plugged them into the home theater setup with exactly the same connections, and never had bad looking SD (that's all we were watching) nor did I have audio sync problems.

The idea of "getting over it" or "moving on" is exactly the same advice I just received over at the AVS Forum, as if I am just being plain stupid, or am mired in the past. Well, in a sense both are true: I'm not as smart as I once was and, silly me, I thought I might still occasionally, once in awhile, be able to watch and enjoy two decades of video that I created myself, as well as all the the film I've resurrected from the past and put into various "old" video formats.

I don't have an answer or course of action at this point, other than to return the set. Clearly there are other sets that don't have the huge video processing delay.

How do all of you live with such horrible looking SD video? Why can't LCD's display interlaced material natively? Why can't they scale the video and preserve at least some of the detail? All I get is clayface, fuzzy mush. Absolutely pathetic.

Digital scaling doesn't really work... whenever you resize an image, you get artifacts.
Pictures, explanation here: http://www.glennchan.info/broadcast-monitors/scaling-artifacts/scaling-artifacts.htm
However, scaling can be good enough in most cases if they choose a filter which gives sharp images + ringing. A lot of computer media players have reasonable image rescaling (well, it depends on taste; ultimately, scaling introduces artifacts).

De-interlacing doesn't really work either. Interlacing throws away half of the information... de-interlacing has to make up the rest and hope the viewer doesn't notice.
De-interlacers vary in how much audio delay there is. If you want good quality de-interlacing, the de-interlacer will have to wait for both fields of the image to be available. Then it has to do a lot of number crunching, which takes time. Teranex's de-interlacer is something like a 6 frame delay (which makes it unsuitable for a lot of monitoring purposes).
Another approach is to simply discard a field, and only use 1 field to create the full frame. You lose resolution but it can be difficult to notice. You also don't have to wait for both fields to arrive... you can start showing the field almost right away.

2- Some professional LCDs (with a panel with very fast response times) can do black line insertion to mimic interlacing. I believe it doubles the black level, because you have to leave the backlight on the whole time (otherwise motion doesn't look right).

---
It could that the designers of the TV put in really cheap chips that do the job. For consumer TVs, there are chips out there designed to be as low cost as possible so they may do weird things.
And/or the designers of the TV didn't put in the effort to make analog SD look and sound decent.

The AVS forum and I have been bitching about SD performance since 2003. I equate it with stretchovision. It just keeps hanging around.
JJK