Author Topic: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them  (Read 21854 times)

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Offline tooki

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #175 on: February 11, 2022, 08:59:37 am »
A Christie or Barco projector blows a home TV out of the water.
Well, an article about the direct view LED cinema claims otherwise: “ Tatsächlich kriegst du Zuhause technisch gesehen das bessere Bild als im Kino.”
 

Offline BrianHG

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #176 on: February 11, 2022, 10:38:10 am »
A Christie or Barco projector blows a home TV out of the water.
OMG, Duh......

125k$ to 750k$ and even higher $ projectors will obviously roast any consumer shit.

Pay attention, dude. The quote I was referring on my post is:

(...)Home theater overtook cinemas in terms of picture quality years ago. (Sound is an altogether different matter.)

Sorry, but the 2 of the Christie setups I've seen just outdo everything else.  Standing right in front of a 300 inch screen, their corner to corner optical focus alone, at every location on the screen where you can seed a clear square grid hatchet from the DLP surface, free of any chromatic divergence whatsoever roasts any consumer grade projector I have ever seen.  No smear at all as if I were looking at a gigantic LCD TV, except each pixel has the RGB superimposed into a single square block.  The true 4k 240Hz support 3 chip dlp also just operate on another level.
 

Online tom66

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #177 on: February 11, 2022, 03:21:07 pm »
If you're comparing anything home-theatre wise to an LCD TV, you're going to be sadly disappointed.

For picture quality plasma, and now OLED, have always been the frontrunners.  LCD was always compromised by slow refresh rates and poor contrast ratio.  The technology has got better over time, but it will fundamentally never keep up with OLED, it's just not achievable.
« Last Edit: February 11, 2022, 03:25:55 pm by tom66 »
 
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Offline tooki

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #178 on: February 11, 2022, 04:19:21 pm »
A Christie or Barco projector blows a home TV out of the water.
OMG, Duh......

125k$ to 750k$ and even higher $ projectors will obviously roast any consumer shit.

Pay attention, dude. The quote I was referring on my post is:

(...)Home theater overtook cinemas in terms of picture quality years ago. (Sound is an altogether different matter.)

Sorry, but the 2 of the Christie setups I've seen just outdo everything else.  Standing right in front of a 300 inch screen, their corner to corner optical focus alone, at every location on the screen where you can seed a clear square grid hatchet from the DLP surface, free of any chromatic divergence whatsoever roasts any consumer grade projector I have ever seen.  No smear at all as if I were looking at a gigantic LCD TV, except each pixel has the RGB superimposed into a single square block.  The true 4k 240Hz support 3 chip dlp also just operate on another level.
Home cinema projectors suck. Gigantic LCDs can look really good. A huge part of the flaws come down to the sources used and the image processing done in the TVs.

Cinema projectors are great, but they can’t ever reach the black levels of a direct-view display.
 

Offline james_s

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #179 on: February 11, 2022, 05:49:59 pm »
The advantage projectors have is size, the picture can be really, really big, and very economical. The physical unit can be very small, for example mounted to the ceiling with a screen you lower while using. Below about 80" though LCD or OLED is going to look a lot better.
 

Offline coppice

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #180 on: February 11, 2022, 05:55:41 pm »
Gigantic LCDs can look really good. A huge part of the flaws come down to the sources used and the image processing done in the TVs.
I wonder how sustainable the market for high end TVs might be? Last year we replaced our high end LG 55" 4K LCD TV from 2013 with a current basic LG model of the same size (I think the old TV died because of a BGA connection problem, but fixing it would have been a PITA). The new one is WAYYYYYY better than the old one. Sure, the top of the line current models look better than the one we bought, but the difference is no longer the huge gulf it used to be, and the price difference is quite large. We just didn't think the difference was worth it.
 
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Online tom66

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #181 on: February 11, 2022, 05:57:39 pm »
The advantage projectors have is size, the picture can be really, really big, and very economical. The physical unit can be very small, for example mounted to the ceiling with a screen you lower while using. Below about 80" though LCD or OLED is going to look a lot better.

Arguably that advantage is diminished by the fact that I can buy a 65" OLED TV for about ~$1500 USD equivalent now.
 
A 4K projector + screen equivalent is going to be butting against that in terms of cost.  I might be able to get 80" or 90" screen size but brightness is going to suffer.  And unless I get a LED projector, I'm going to need to replace the bulb fairly frequently.

So, poorer contrast and brightness but a bigger image, versus a huge frickin' OLED panel...  I know what I'd choose.
 

Offline coppice

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #182 on: February 11, 2022, 06:04:28 pm »
The advantage projectors have is size, the picture can be really, really big, and very economical. The physical unit can be very small, for example mounted to the ceiling with a screen you lower while using. Below about 80" though LCD or OLED is going to look a lot better.
Direct view LED can be as big as you like. This thread has only talked about the cinema ones, but the huge panels made for public displays are now very impressive too. Its only a few years since most of these things looked awful, yet there were impressive ones in the early 2000s. In 2003 I used to see an experimental display being developed outside an R&D site of a division of TCL in Shenzhen. It must have been about 10m wide, and in bright daylight the images looked superb. I guess that one was only 1920x1080. I never saw how the LEDs were calibrated, but I did see the calibration corrections being turned on and off sometimes. It looked pretty bad until it was calibrated.
 

Offline tooki

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #183 on: February 11, 2022, 06:28:50 pm »
Cost is the limiting factor at the moment: direct-view LED is still several times as expensive as cinema projectors to achieve the same size.
 

Offline james_s

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #184 on: February 11, 2022, 11:34:17 pm »
Arguably that advantage is diminished by the fact that I can buy a 65" OLED TV for about ~$1500 USD equivalent now.
 
A 4K projector + screen equivalent is going to be butting against that in terms of cost.  I might be able to get 80" or 90" screen size but brightness is going to suffer.  And unless I get a LED projector, I'm going to need to replace the bulb fairly frequently.

So, poorer contrast and brightness but a bigger image, versus a huge frickin' OLED panel...  I know what I'd choose.

Sure but that's only 65". I know several people who have home theater setups with 100" plus screens, there's really no comparison. Personally I have a 65" LCD TV that is good enough for my purposes but it's not really close to offering the cinema experience. The lamps in lamp based projectors last at least a couple of thousand hours, that's many hundreds of movies. I have a projector that I've used occasionally over the last 10 years or so and I've never changed the lamp which was used already when I got it.
 
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Offline AndyC_772

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #185 on: February 12, 2022, 07:51:09 am »
Also bear in mind that physical room layout is an issue, for any room that's not a dedicated theatre.

We have a 55" OLED screen, which sits on its stand in a bay window. A bigger display wouldn't physically fit the space.

For movies, though, we also have a 120" projection screen mounted to the ceiling, which can be dropped down for the duration of a film, and retracted otherwise. It practically divides the room in two; there's no way we'd want a fixed screen of that size all the time, but it does give a genuinely cinematic experience when needed.

I'm waiting for the industry to come up with the 'projector-less screen' - a large format OLED (or whatever) panel printed onto a flexible substrate, that can be deployed when needed and rolled up out of the way otherwise. We've already seen the phone industry start to experiment with smaller flexible screens, so it's not as though it's a technology that's completely in the realms of science fiction.
 
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Offline coppice

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #186 on: February 12, 2022, 09:39:16 pm »
I'm waiting for the industry to come up with the 'projector-less screen' - a large format OLED (or whatever) panel printed onto a flexible substrate, that can be deployed when needed and rolled up out of the way otherwise.
LG showed off rollable OLED screens a while ago. Oddly, they rolled up from a box in the table. I would have through the market would really be for ones rolling down from above - i.e. like a projector screen coming down from the ceiling when needed.
 

Offline PlainName

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #187 on: February 12, 2022, 10:23:51 pm »
Maybe the thinking was that a box on a table is easily moved and plugged in (and stored). OOB experience is high. Fixing to a ceiling requires at least a handyman, probably an electrician, etc. OOB experience is s l o w.
 

Online tom66

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #188 on: February 12, 2022, 10:44:57 pm »
Some other interesting tech that didn't take off - rollable plasma screens.

Yes, you read that right... though I notice they were very careful to limit the amount of flex on the actual panel. 

 
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Offline bw2341

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #189 on: February 12, 2022, 11:40:32 pm »
https://displaysolutions.samsung.com/pdf/datasheet/3902/The_Wall_Datasheet_200315_WEB.pdf

.pdf]https://www.lg.com/global/business/download/resources/CT00000221/LG%20MAGNIT_Datasheet(preview)_Micro%20LED_210916[20210916_172002].pdf

https://pro.sony/ue_US/products/led-video-walls

Just daydreaming a bit and reading up on MicroLED displays. It looks like what the TV companies are bringing to the market are finer pitch displays and higher contrast. I wonder where that leaves the legacy videowall companies that seem to be smaller and regionally focused. They were probably importing generic Chinese LED matrix panels to make their videowalls.

I tried to look up the contrast specifications for LG's OLED displays to compare and came up with a bunch of infinite contrast nonsense. (Something divided by zero equals infinity!) The standard way to measure might be in a totally dark environment, but that's not very useful. We're not going to be sitting in the dark wearing black pants, sweater and balaclava.

Samsung specifies the contrast of The Wall at 30000:1 with 10 lux illumination. A quick search found that 10 lux is the brightness at twilight. So I guess that is a bit darker that a typical living room. Still that gives a number for comparison.

LG claims that their MAGNIT display is 150000:1 at 10 lux. It would be fun to hold up an LG panel next to a Samsung to see what a claim of 5 times blacker looks like. From the videowall at my Apple Store, an unlit panel looks as dark as matte black wall paint. It isn't a pure deep black like a glossy piano or a car. The Apple Store displays are probably commercial grade displays at a few thousand to one contrast ratio.

Sony's LED video walls all claim "More than 1,000,000:1", even the high-brightness models that have a washed out product photo compared the high-contrast models. Thanks for nothing Sony!
 

Offline AndyC_772

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #190 on: February 13, 2022, 08:56:59 am »
Maybe the thinking was that a box on a table is easily moved and plugged in (and stored). OOB experience is high. Fixing to a ceiling requires at least a handyman, probably an electrician, etc. OOB experience is s l o w.

My guess would be it's intended for rental, in which case it's important to have a product which can be transported from site to site without the need for 'installation' as such at all.

Offline PlainName

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Re: An expensive TV is a poor investment, and people spend FAR too much on them
« Reply #191 on: February 13, 2022, 12:09:48 pm »
At that price, rental would make sense, yes.
 


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