Within the next couple of years I would like to get a new TV, mainly to go bigger (I currently have a 50″). But the one thing that I now wonder, is can I go “better”? I have never had many problems with the picture quality of my 50″ CRT rear-projection HD-ready Toshiba, other than a little red “push” and the blacks not being that great (having details lost in dark scenes). But I often making comparisons, if only in passing, with my son’s 37″ HP LCD. And it makes me wonder if a change to LCD in the future is actually an upgrade. Sunday, I started up Hellboy for my son on his PC, which is in xvid format. I know that it may not have been the best rip, but I’ve watched part of it on my own 50″ Toshiba and never had any gripes about the picture quality. However, what I saw on his TV was pretty bad. The words at the beginning looked kind of fuzzy and, as someone mentioned in one of their posts about their cable TV, the picture looked kind of like an 8-bit video game (sorry, but I had to borrow that line). I also tried it out on our newly acquired 32″ Zenith LCD on my main PC and it looked bad, too (using an 8800GTS 512 video card).
So, do LCDs just show imperfections more or are CRTs just actually better, with LCD only having an advantage in slimness/size? Could part of it be that on the LCDs that I tried, that de-interlacing is going on (and not being done that well) and on my CRT it’s 1080i so there’s no de-interlacing? I do like watching the xvid rips that I have, but I can’t see watching them with the picture quality that I saw the other day. And as I’ve said before, analog satellite TV does not impress me on LCD.
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