Thinking about upgrading home theater...

if your looking too get a new tv get something at least 1080i, 1080p you honeslty wont notice the differance the framerate and refresh rate with 1080p is faster than what the human eye can capture and decode. so honeslty its a waste of money. if your looking to get a bluray player go with a Playstation3 it is the best bluray player on the market. now if your going to be hooking it up to a surround sound system be sure you hook it to either digital coaxle or optical. the largest differance you will notice is the sound quaility. its breathtaking if you have the correct setup. stay away from cheaper brand tv's. retailers will push certain products and tv's on you saying that they are comparable to the higher end but honestly there not the vibrancy of color is what you wanna look for and she sharpess of the picture. ask them to put in different dvd's or demo discs so you might see a differance and believe me there is especailly with white and black colors some tv's do a horrable job of producing a crisp dark black color to where they almost look gray and can project a picture that looks too grainy as a result of that. pioneer makes an amazing plazma tv which is one of the best on the market its called the pioneer elite. check it out you will be more than impressed. as for lcd's LG and Sony are great manufactures of those. dont believe the rumor about when a a plasma will burn out faster then a lcd its bull**** unless you are watching it 24 hours a day 7 days a week 365 days a year for 4 years yeah they will both go bad over time. but a lcd will produce an aooying thing called pixil rot. its when a single or more pixel will burn up in the screen and you will have a black dot in the screen some might say its not that bad but when your eyes keep wandering tawords it and noticing it believe me it will get to you after some time. plasmas on the other hand when referring to a good plamsa will have the same life expectancy. But they will look as good the day it dies till the day from the day you bought it. where lcd's will expierance pixel rot/death. but im not putting lcd's down they are more than great i own 2 of them alon with a 50'' plasma i honestly prefer my plasma for its bright vibrant colors which are proven to be better in a plasma compared to a lcd. just keep what i told you in mind when making your purchase. I have both a HD Dvd player and the Playstation 3 and i notice a big differance with a the bluray quailty. i can see why HD DVD was phase out and blueray won the war. The playstation 3 is the only blueray player that can update its firmware and software through a internet connection. which is vital and saves time as bluray gets larger certain discs will require these upgrades to be played giving the Ps3 the upmost advantage.

 

Yeah, I have a 50" 720p Pio Elite and a 40" 1080p Samsung LCD. I'll take the Elite any day for watching football games, movies, HD content, etc. I'm of the camp that plasma still has a better picture overall. BTW, if anyone is ever interested in any Yamaha, Marantz, Parasound, Atlantic Technology, Samsung, Sharp, or Panasonic gear, let me know. I have a good friend here in STL that is a custom installer and he has a tendency to hook my friends up. Basically, he's authorized and you would be hard pressed to find a better deal online or elsewhere.

 

Elites are sweet i have the same 50" in my room lol. kind of extreme ill admit myself for the size of the room but i designed my room to be like a theatre along with 7.2 harmon kardon surround. it took me 2 years to get everything the way i wanted it along with changing the drywall and insulation to sound dampening products which i have to say got to add up more than my tv and surround itself but it payed off well. overall id say i love my Elite i had an ambilight before loved that too but the elite has a lil better picture sort of miss the lighting effect among the walls from the philips but the quailty of the Elite is better. all my buddies have LCD's yet i still get compliments on my Elite for being so bright and vibrant. also i was reading in a previous comment left the spyder calibration tool is really something too look into i have one as wll and it made a huge differance in the perfomance of my tv

 

Thanks again for all the input boys! My father has a few Pioneer Elites and they are indeed fantastic TVs! I personally really like the Sony's, and with the discount at work it really is a no brainer.

But keep the ideas flowing, I'm learning here...

 

Asking people which TV they like best is a bit like asking what's the best wax. There's going to be a lot of different opinions.

 

:thumb::giterdone:

what everyone else said. 1080p and blu-ray is the best picture/resolution you can get. If you get the blu-ray without upgrading your tv, you will not be taking advantage of the blu-ray 1080p resolution. They will complement each other perfectly. There are cheaper TV's out there than Sony with great pictures for far less money. If money is no object and you're happy with Sony, the get it. I'm always in favor of same name components as they're made to work with each other. If I get a blu-ray, it will be a PS-3. I have an XBox 360, which plays at 1080p, but it's only HD, not blu-ray. With your discount, you should probably go with Sony:thumb:

 

1080i and 1080p have nothing to do with frame rates or refresh rates. It has to do with how the image is displayed on the screen I = interlaced and P = progressive. With interlaced the imaged is displayed line 1, line 3, line 5 etc. etc. all the way to 1080. It then comes back and does the even lines. With progressive it goes in order 1,2,3,4,5 etc. etc. down to 1080. The picture quality IS different (read: better with 1080p). For the record the human eye cannot detect frame rates greater than 30fps. If you're a hardcore gamer you'll know this. I laugh when I read about the latest and grates PC hardware in the magazines that will display images faster than that.

 

you are right about that but i have quad SLI in my pc i forgot how much my frame rate is but it far greater than what the human eye can catch... was a huge waste of money... i only set that up to play crysis made everything flow nice and crisp but after a ceartain point in the putting graphics from medium to full i couldent see any differance besides hard and soft shadows. and after buying a nice lcd monitor i relized that the lcd cant keep up with the cards so i went back to a CRT monitor.

 

Also if you are using HDMI inputs you don't need the digital coaxial or optical cables for sound ad HDMI can carry both pic and sound but you will need your audio reciever to have HDMI inputs to accomplish the true surround sound with HDMI.

Also, and I know I'm harping on this but you can make a cheaper brand look as good as the elite brands. I have a Magnavox plasma and it looks better than any TV I have gone to calibrate and I have calibrated a lot of them. Heck my small town of 30,000 people probably have more truely calibrated TVs per capita than anywhere else, LOL! Now if you are going to have the TV calibrated yoyomoefoe is right and you will be able to tell a slight and I mean slight difference in picture quality with the higher end models. But if you are going to have it properly calibrated then a cheaper model will look as good as the most expensive uncalibrated model at the store. Now I will say that this is all true when talking plasmas but I have seen a difference and pretty noticeable one in quality between lower end and higher end LCDs. Even after calibration lower end model LCDs cant compare to a calibrated higher end LCD.

 

Correct.

Also I agree with the second part. I have Olevia LCD's and have no complaints.

 

Good information here...see I've always been a Sony fan and to be honest I've gone to a few friends' houses and I've noticed they have now changed to other brans. I asked them what happened to Sony and they just reply saying Sony needs to step it up, they can't rely on reputation to get them by :shrug: very interesting thread boys, I too am learning quite a bit :thumb: