Telly Quest 4

Lewis sent me some good information on a comparison of a top end LCD screen versus a Plasma panel. I've been deliberately steering clear of actually looking at these things in the shops as it'll just make me fret. You can read the other posts and comments on this subject be searching the blog for "Telly Quest"

I had a nose around a "Tweeter" store here (Houston) yesterday, and saw what I expected to be the screen of my dreams. It was one of the new 45" LCD "Aquos" ones by Sharp, offering a true 1920 x 1080 resolution, so able to deal with the 1080p high def signal. Sad to say this thing wasn't what I had hoped it would be, and the reason I thought that was because it was mounted on a wall with a number of other screens all showing the same video from the same signal.

They were displaying a football (real football, what the sales guy called soccer) game on them, and it was not a high def signal. Some of the screens were LCD, and some plasma, and in a variety of sizes. All these screens were big branded high end products, and the viewing area was lit just like the average living room would be with the blinds shut. No strong direct lights on the screens, no bright fluorescent lighting in that area of he shop. It was a great opportunity to get a direct comparison of the two technologies, and it turns out that a football game makes a good test image for viewing. You get sharply contrasting colours between the strips and the pitch/advertising boards etc, bursts of fast moving action, and then slow close ups with plenty of detail. To properly compare things you would need to see some dark scenes too, but on the whole a football game is a good place to start.

Firstly in many ways the image quality was pretty consistent on all the screens, nice and sharp, with clear edging etc, but the thing I noticed most was the colour. On the plasma screens things were really rich and vibrant, in comparison the LCD looked washed out. I commented on this to the salesman, and suggested that the LCD screen could do with better setting up. He explained that with the LCD screens you don't get as much configuration as you do with the plasma's, and that this was about as good as you could get. I know from experience that most plasma screens come with a boggling amount of configuration options, and took him at his word on the LCD's.

To be fair all these screens were most likely just plugged in as delivered, so the output I saw was probably a bit of a lottery, and in spite of what the salesman said, I am sure things could have been improved somewhat with a bit of tweaking. Additionally on some of the plasma screens the contrast and brilliance were clearly too high with unnatural looking colours. But there were eight or so screens all fairly close together, and you could easily pick out the LCD's from a distance.

I had always read about the contrast performance not being as good with LCD, but until I saw a load of them all together I didn't really appreciate what an impact it would have. On the plus side the salesman was telling me they had sold a dozen or so Sharp LCD TV's, and nobody had been in touch regards dead pixels. Similarly I am on my fourth laptop, and haven't experienced one so far. I suspect that if I hadn't seen the screen in that setting, I would have thought it was excellent, ignorance being bliss and all that. But now that I have I don't think I would be as quick to trade my plasma in as I might have been before.