Thinpanel /wall Mountable T.v??

[a2aa]

guys,

off the wall question( no punn intended) Anyone have any experience with the gateway 42" thinpanel television for $2990. How is it compared to the higher priced models of phillips and pioneer??( $6400-$7500)

What should I be looking for in terms of what a THINPANEL TV can deliver?? wHAT SPECS SHOULD i LOOK FOR?? Why are the others twice as much as the Gateway one?

Regards,

[jcyuhn]

I was at BB yesterday purchasing a cheap DSL router and saw they had a Daewoo brand plasma flat panel TV for about the same price. It was 40" or 42" HDTV, price was ~$3K. Hopefully they have more staying power in TVs than automobiles.

Why the fascination with flat panel? It's an expensive and immature technology. Plasma has problems with burn in and dead pixels. CRT has burn in problems. DLP has neither, but requires very expensive bulbs as a light source. LCD suffers dead pixels, but not burn in. Guess you gotta pick your poison. I recently bought an old-tech CRT rear projection HDTV. Great picture, very bright, lots of detail, 53" size, and only cost $1650. Bleeding edge is expensive.

For discussion of all things AV & home theater, try http://www.avscience.com It's the Mercedesshop of the audio/visual world.

- Jim

[MTI]

I think you'll find that the folks at AVScience are down on the Gateway 42 panel because the Panasonic 42" is a better performer for about $500 more. The Gateway is a rebadged Sampo and has a lower pixel count than the Panny or Pio.

Flat panel is not for everyone, yet. Neither is a Mercedes, get the point? I got a 50" Pioneer because I didn't want to give away a good chunk of my family room to an RPTV. Burn in is an issue, but only if you're an idiot in the way you treat your monitor. Dead pixels can happen, but it's virtually unheard of in modern production. Plasma has one of the widest viewing angles and none of the convergence issues of rear projection or multiple gun CRTs. It's also a great choice when you have little control over the ambient light in the viewing room. There's also a lot to be said about the quality of the light coming from all those gas filled bubbles, I've yet to see a front or rear projection or crt tv display an HD signal with as good a "through the looking glass" effect than on a plasma.

Plasma is an energy hog for sure.

[elau]

I read it somewhere not all flat panel TVs are created equal. The cheap ones are probably still using the old technology - analog; whereas the $6K - $7K ones are truely digital and are ready for HDTV programs. However, not all programs you get from cable companies are using the HDTV format today, so spending that much $$$ on the TV may not get what you hope for. It is still a few years away before HDTV becomes mainstream.

I think, like others already mentioned, a big screen rear-projection TV is still a better choice. At least for a few years anyways.

[MTI]

Plasma panels are "digital" since they're actually computer monitors being used to display video. There's no scan rates on a panel and you can run NTSC and PAL format on a plasma. I'm not sure that holds for older LCD screens.

Plasma exposes the flaws in over compressed digital cable and satellite broadcasts, sometimes to the point of buyer remorse when the wife asks why reruns of "Friends" look so crappy on the expensive screen compared to the 27" Sony Trinitron and you try to explain, it's not the screen, it's the broadcast.

[a2aa]

I appreciate all the interesting responses . Space consevation is still a major priority in this decision. When you say burn in, what does that exactly mean, jcyuhn? When it comes to modern electronics, I'm lost out in left field. Again, thanks for the help.

[jcyuhn]

Burn in is when a particular image is literally burned into the screen of the television. Think of an ATM where you can always see the image of the welcome screen even after it changes to display something. That image is shown for so long it literally is burned into the screen.

This same problem can happen to RPTVs. Video games are probably the biggest offender, but those channel 'bugs' shown in the lower right corner of the screen can do the trick too. For the most part you can avoid this problem by properly adjusting the brightness and contrast settings. Lots of discussion of this topic over on the avscience forum.

Again, RPTVs and plasma can burn in. LCD and DLP don't. One more thing to consider. TVs, like so many other things, are a lot more complex than they used to be...

- Jim

[Robert W. Roe]

I saw the Gateway 42" plasma tv Friday night. I was not that impressed by the picture quality. For that money I'd probably go HDTV CRT, and get the HDTV tuner with the money I'd save, OR go up to the $4000-$4500 range and get either a better 42" plasma or go up to a 50" DLP. I saw a Samsung DLP that wasn't too bad, $4299 for the 50" DLP. I did see some digital artifacts that didn't make me want to start whipping out Visa's and MasterCards.

Right now I'm running an early 1990's Sony PVM-3230. Best NTSC picture I've seen yet. Retail was $2899 or so, without a tuner or speakers. I just saw one go on Ebay for around $200. The PVM 2530's are much more common, and go for a couple hundread also. NTSC, but with the S-Video input the picture is amazingly good. DVD's and digital cable (S-Video) look excellent.

All this makes me very picky to spend more than I paid ($1900 dealer cost back around 1992) to get a marginally better picture. I have yet to see a tube TV put out the kind of dynamic picture of the PVM series. I'll probably wait until the next price drop, unless the ol' PVM dies suddenly.

Check here http://www.plasmatvbuyingguide.com/plasmatv/reviews.html.

I have a Sony 57" Hi-scan and love it. The only problem is unless it's in HD you notice every inperfection in the picture. My second choice was the Mitsubishi...wait that was my first choice but my wife liked the "looks" of the Sony better because it has a built in HD tuner so you are ready to rock. I have a large living room so the space loss to the rear projection was not a problem. I think I paid 3K or something. I will be getting a Plasma sometime this year for the bedroom ceiling though.

[MTI]

Over the recent past, plasma prices have already dropped from the "oh my god" level to the "hmmm" price range. With a plasma screen in every tv commercial, it's not suprising that consumer demand is rising. What needs tweaking is production capability to drive the cost lower. Those glass and gas bubbles are still pretty hard to make compared to LCD and CRT screens but if the handful of actual glass makers (Pioneer, NEC, Fujitsu and I believe Panasonic) can ramp up production, plasma prices will continue to fall and screens will get bigger, beyond the 61's now available.

[G-Benz]

Originally posted by 123c
I was watching some tv show last night, and it said to a year or so for buying a plasma display, since the prices will drop by 50%.

That has certainly happened to the HDTVs...not three years ago, I balked at the 5-figure cost of those behemoths!

Picked up a 52" for about $2100 last summer!

Went to a restaurant with my wife yesterday, and they had their plasma that they installed about four years ago (when it was state-of-the-art and close to $20K), and the picture has degraded quite a bit! But it might be that the newer sets have better technology!

[MTI]

Originally posted by G-Benz
Went to a restaurant with my wife yesterday, and they had their plasma that they installed about four years ago (when it was state-of-the-art and close to $20K), and the picture has degraded quite a bit! But it might be that the newer sets have better technology!

It might not be the screen that degraded, but more likely an over compressed satellite or cable signal, especially those "digital" signals.