Help me pick out a HDTV 40" or smaller

[motivez]

Yeah, I think I'll be staying away. Don't want to deal with that if I'm going to be spending this much..

[thomez]

I don't watch a lot of non-HD stuff on mine, so I can't say. I know my mother does on hers (Samsung DLP as well) and it looks decent, but obviously taking low quality tv on a big screen is going to make it look worse than on a lil CRT. It doesn't bother me any though

[motivez]

I went back up to Best Buy earlier and switched all of the channels from the HD 1080i/720p to a standard input channel

I have to say, I'm completely unimpressed with the Samsung DLP's. The images were massively distorted and looked horrible

However, the both Sony's I looked at did not really have a huge problem with it. Obviously the image was not as clear, but even so.. it was MUCH better than any of the Samsung's I looked at.

What's up with that?

[thomez]

no idea, I notice no distortion at all with normal TV, but I'm normally only watching HDTV or playing Xbox with mine

did you check the settings? was it stretching the image, because that WILL make it look terrible (trying to stretch SDTV across the HDTV distorts the hell out of things, looks awful)

you have to make sure when you are watching HDTV that you are looking at a normal 4:3 aspect ratio, it will have the black bars down both the left and right sides of the screen

[Ardentfrost]

You won't see a rainbow unless the screen is too big for your room which causes you to have to look wide left and right. To figure out if the screen is too big for your room, multiply 2 * (distance to the TV in inches) * tan 15 degrees. That will give you the max width of the TV. Remember that TVs are measured by their diagonal measurement, not width, so check out the screen width through trig or from the specs on the web.

The Sony KDA LCDs are real nice. That's the only LCD I would suggest getting. Otherwise I'd go for RP DLP everytime. The Samsungs are good, but don't base your opinion fully on what you see in the store... those guys don't know how to setup the TV.

And bump LCoS, it's old technology

[6SpeedTA95]

There's some fantastic plasma's on clearance right now at many stores. The new pannys come out this week.