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I'm in the process of finishing my basement and one of the things I'm going to have down there is a home theater. I've been keeping my eye on large monitors for the last few years and now that I'm only months from purchasing I'm getting more interested.
Today I stopped by Best Buy to have a look.
I'm not sure what the feed to the monitors was, and the saleperson couldn't really tell me, he just said "over the air." I was like what the hell does that mean? Best Buy has their own TV channel that broadcasts a demo loop? I didn't say that to him of course I just slowly nodded and said "ooookaayyy."
Anyway the demo loop had varying material. It all looked quite good when standing back about 4 or 5 feet (or more). But only some of the material looked exceptional under close up inspection to my eyes.
My favorite monitor out of the ones I saw today was the $3800 Sony Bravia 46". Next was the Samsung of the same size at $3100. Both are 1080p and with good source material looked pretty stunning. There was also a 1366x768 Sony for around $2500 that also looked very good.
Next I found a BR player connected to a Sony 40" LCD. It was playing a loop of a few movies. Again some were stunning and others had a little too much of that pixel flickering effect you can see from either bad encoding or not enough bitrate. Like I said, from 4 or 5 feet away they still looked very good. But just knowing it wasn't holding up under close inspection bothered me. I can't deny that fact.
Now the interesting thing is they had a demo of a movie playing with a horizontal line moving back and forth. Everything on one side of the line would go from SD to HD when the line moved left to right, and SD to HD when moving right to left.
Now the interesting thing about this is that when the shooting was using larger apertures (less depth of field) I could only notice a difference between HD and SD in the portions of the picture that were in focus. So now I can see why most HD demos involve a lot of landscape shots. Those shots are always shot with high f-stops so that everything is in focus, thus showing off HD the most. Also realize that since these shots are outside so that enough light is available to keep shutter speeds up.
In my opinion the good news is that there are some quite good monitors out there that have really come down in price over the past few years. You can get a very good ~40 inch monitor for around $2000.
The other good news is that the HD video chain does show promise. With a good monitor and good source the results can be excellent.
The bad news, as Jerry as said, is that from what I saw in my brief sampling today, there is more bad content than good at the moment.
I think I'm going to spring for a good monitor and build an HTPC for it. That way I can play my DVD's with the software/hardware player of my choice. And I can store content on the hard drive for quick access. Then when the time is right I'll go for an HD drive for the computer.
I don't know perhaps I'm being a little too picky. I'm not going to be watching a 46" screen from 3 feet away but for some reason I think I should be able to freeze the program, walk up and have a look and not see any encoding artifacts. Is that too much to ask? I'm still excited about the technology but would like to see a bunch of discs to see what is really going on.
Today I stopped by Best Buy to have a look.
I'm not sure what the feed to the monitors was, and the saleperson couldn't really tell me, he just said "over the air." I was like what the hell does that mean? Best Buy has their own TV channel that broadcasts a demo loop? I didn't say that to him of course I just slowly nodded and said "ooookaayyy."
Anyway the demo loop had varying material. It all looked quite good when standing back about 4 or 5 feet (or more). But only some of the material looked exceptional under close up inspection to my eyes.
My favorite monitor out of the ones I saw today was the $3800 Sony Bravia 46". Next was the Samsung of the same size at $3100. Both are 1080p and with good source material looked pretty stunning. There was also a 1366x768 Sony for around $2500 that also looked very good.
Next I found a BR player connected to a Sony 40" LCD. It was playing a loop of a few movies. Again some were stunning and others had a little too much of that pixel flickering effect you can see from either bad encoding or not enough bitrate. Like I said, from 4 or 5 feet away they still looked very good. But just knowing it wasn't holding up under close inspection bothered me. I can't deny that fact.
Now the interesting thing is they had a demo of a movie playing with a horizontal line moving back and forth. Everything on one side of the line would go from SD to HD when the line moved left to right, and SD to HD when moving right to left.
Now the interesting thing about this is that when the shooting was using larger apertures (less depth of field) I could only notice a difference between HD and SD in the portions of the picture that were in focus. So now I can see why most HD demos involve a lot of landscape shots. Those shots are always shot with high f-stops so that everything is in focus, thus showing off HD the most. Also realize that since these shots are outside so that enough light is available to keep shutter speeds up.
In my opinion the good news is that there are some quite good monitors out there that have really come down in price over the past few years. You can get a very good ~40 inch monitor for around $2000.
The other good news is that the HD video chain does show promise. With a good monitor and good source the results can be excellent.
The bad news, as Jerry as said, is that from what I saw in my brief sampling today, there is more bad content than good at the moment.
I think I'm going to spring for a good monitor and build an HTPC for it. That way I can play my DVD's with the software/hardware player of my choice. And I can store content on the hard drive for quick access. Then when the time is right I'll go for an HD drive for the computer.
I don't know perhaps I'm being a little too picky. I'm not going to be watching a 46" screen from 3 feet away but for some reason I think I should be able to freeze the program, walk up and have a look and not see any encoding artifacts. Is that too much to ask? I'm still excited about the technology but would like to see a bunch of discs to see what is really going on.
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