Our Panny plasmas put out a lot of heat, which is a problem for the one in the bedroom. Do today’s LED or whatever the best tech is also put off as much heat as the old plasmas?
Expect that’s most of the issue. I don’t recall the theoretical “ideal” viewing distance for a 60 inch, but remember it being over 5 feet and under 10.
The color banding and other artifacts could be due to the quality of the electronics, as others have mentioned. But also Suggest calibrating the display, turning off the typical store demo settings (over saturated, bad color balance etc). You may find that helps a lot (we sure did with our current set).
Diego
Yeah, the pricing is weird. The average Best Buy ad, for example, is full of inexpensive 4k TVs that seem about the same price as non-4k sets, and the sheer variety of features across the board makes comparison hard.
No, and it’s not even close (at least for regular LED - not sure about OLED, but supposedly OLED is closer to LED than Plasma in terms of power consumption) - my plasma is like a wall-mounted hot plate, whereas I can’t really even tell my LEDs are on.
This x100. Modern TV’s are soooo full signal altering bullshit features - auto skin tone, auto dimming, sports modes, auto noise control, motion smoothing, blah, blah blah.
Turn all that shit off and then calibrate contrast, brightness and saturation using any number of online guides. Also remember to calibrate under typical viewing lighting conditions.
That’s what I love about my Panny plasma. I set it to “THX” mode and I’m done. No further calibration necessary. When I upgrade to 4K, I’ll be looking specifically for such a feature.
When I first got my Panny plasma, I got all techie and went to the appropriate forums, purchased a light/color meter made for televison calibration and got the software, and went in to the service menu and actually spent a couple of hours doing the kind of calibration a professional would do. It’s takes time and patience, and you can screw up your TV if you don’t know what you’re doing, but I was amazed at how great the results were. In my current job, we do a LOT of color matching, color work, etc. and use Xrite and other color meters, as well as our eyes. So, I’m very sensitive to a little too much red in a green, for example.
But yeah, even if you don’t want to do all that, a good calibration Bluray disc will let you set your contrast, brightness, saturation, and any RGB controls you have and will make a really big difference.
We had a VT60 Panny that died earlier this year; man I miss the image quality. Ended up buying a middle of the road Samsung LED 64 inch. The heat output difference is night and day. Unfortunately, so is the image quality. It’s ok, but there were moments with the Panny where you just stop and say wow to the picture quality.
I have a Panny plasma (720p) and I love it. However, we just got a new LED tv, the “best $500 tv” Vizio recommended by thewirecutter (albeit a 50" one, so our final cost was more like $600). It’s here. It is phenomenal to see the picture - the upscaling to UHD is amazing. Interestingly enough, it makes everything that’s HD look like the Hobbit movies that were filmed at 48 fps… all the tv shows look like they’ve been filmed on videotape. The clarity is mind blowing, though… It blows the plasma away.
That will be an artifact of some kind of motion smoothing feature. My Samsung did the same thing until I located it and turned it off. YMMV, in that you may not mind that look, but it drove me batty.
Yeah, the filmed on videotape look drives me insane. Half the TVs on display at Costco or Sam’s or Best Buy now have that look. I just look at that and go, why would they do this on the display floor? To scare people away from buying these TVs? I guess I must be in the minority. People must like that look.
Same here. The Vizio plasma we originally had was much worse at upscaling HD content than the Panasonic we ended up with after 2 Vizio’s broke down on us. Thankfully we had the good old Costco warranty before it changed.
Will definitely be looking at reviews on that feature when we upgrade. Also, no advertising injection (I’m looking at you Samsung ) or other spy "features ".
I absolutely hate that effect.
I don’t understand the appeal of that motion smoothing effect. It’s terrible and makes everything look terrible. Who wants it? It’s the first thing I turn off when I buy a new TV.
65" Sharp 4K TV on order to replace the 70" TV that my youngest son ruined by throwing an Xbox controller at it and breaking the screen. He swears it was an accident, but we still had a nice long lecture about self control and how little he has had lately.
I’m curious about how nice a 4K set will look over a standard HDTV. You can never tell what regular sources will look like from the store-demo mode.
Still pretty angry at the pointless loss of an $1800 set. It’s been 2 weeks, but still feeling it. Maybe when the old one’s gone.
ha-ha, that brings up memories. When I was about 7 or 8, I had a BB gun and it was the kind where you pour in about a 100 BB’s. Well, we had a indoor target range in our basement, and I had unloaded all of them, even shook the gun, and no BB’s were coming out anymore. So what does a 8 yr old do when he’s watching TV? Well of course he play shoots the bad characters on the screen. I was having a great time and then somehow a BB that had withstood all previous cocks / shots / shaking, managed to work itself loose, and I can still see that BB as it exited the barrel and hit the TV square on.
This was back in the days where there was a protective glass sheet over the actual TV, so we just had to remove the glass and could still watch TV, but man I got spanked hard. Never did play shoot anything on the TV ever after that incident.
For what it’s worth, the best time to buy a new high-end TV is pretty much right now, for the next 3-4 weeks. Everyone announces their 2016 models at CES and last year’s models go on big sales.
Are you guys talking about the “soap opera effect”? Everything looks cheap and crappy. And kinda blurry, even thought it’s not?
LCDs had this, never saw a plasma with it.
FWIW I bought this (Wirecutter) $500 40" Samsung UN40J5500 for a family member recently. The screen looks great. The built-in aps could be better (I had a spare roku, so put that in instead). The sound could be louder. Soundbar would cost $200-$300 extra, but it includes a subwoofer that I find ridiculously rude to use in apartment buildings.
It’s now down to $400 on Amazon for the 40". Note it’s only 1080p, but at that size, who cares? I’m considering picking up the 55" for $700ish.
I haven’t followed the 4k deal but I’m not convinced it’s important. As long as I can plug in a PS4 and read the little numbers on the TV screen it will be fine.
The soap opera effect makes people movements to be extra smooth and floaty with little blurriness, unless the LCD is super slow and crappy. All your old movies will seem like they’re shot from an indoor studio. The effect is really weird for us grownups.
Yep and on my Samsung LEDs, the culprit was the motion smoothing setting (Auto Motion Plus or something). Disabling that made the effect go away.