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townsend

I sent my reply and was greeted by the retarded "your shit ain't there" message. I didn't type this for nothing, so here's a copy & paste for you...

Re: 1920x1080 resolution, you won't see this via 42" plasma until late 2007/2008 (there were some rumblings from Hitachi, but I doubt they're anywhere close to mass production). Pioneer has just released a 50" model, but the MSRP is $10k. Panasonic previewed a 50" model at one of the shows, but for whatever reason they will not be releasing it this year. However, they will be releasing a 65" model in about 2 months and the MSRP should be around $8.5k or very close to it. And if 65" isn't enough for you, they are now taking orders for their 103" plasma (that's right, over 8 1/2 ft of Full HD plasma -- guess LG and Samsung know who's got the biggest dick now!). Other than that, as far as I know it won't be until at least Q1/Q2 '07 before anyone else gets into the 1920x1080 resolution category for plasma.

Best Buy and Circuit City usually have 1080i Hi-Def feeds going throughout the store. Unfortunately, not every display is getting the best feed due to how those signals are routed and the crazy settings some displays are using. There's a Best Buy about 35mi from where I am living and the consumer 50" Panasonic has one of the worst pictures compared to the rest of the plasmas (nearly all of the settings are cranked to the max and it's running in Vivid mode!). If anyone bases their decision on the images that these displays are currently giving, they'd be making a serious mistake.

Based on impressions of the new Panasonic 50" 9UK model, Panasonic has another winner in the plasma category. While it's not 1920x1080, the 1366x768 pixels still produce the best blacks in all of plasma and the new 16-bit processing adds a new dimension to the already excellent picture. And if you're worried about input resolutions, for the last several years Panasonic's commercial models have supported, along with other input resolutions, 1920x1080p (as in progressive input, not just interlaced) over analog -- RGB(HV), YPbPr and VGA -- and digital -- via the DVI-HDCP card.

Since you mentioned Oppo, be forewarned that Panasonic's plasmas are in that list of displays that don't get along with Faroudja's 23xx series chips (all-in-one deinterlacing/scaling). Oppo did some tweaking to their 971 DVI player to reduce the artifacts, but not all manufacturers responded in the way that they did. Their new 970 HDMI player doesn't use the Faroudja chip; instead, it uses Mediatek's all-in-one deinterlacer/scaler and therefore doesn't exhibit those artifacts. It's not as good as the Faroudja chip, but not having artifacts is a welcomed trade-off for some.



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Topic - townsend - Joe Murphy Jr 20:42:54 08/14/06 (10)


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