Top 5 Home Video Mistakes
By Mark Fleischmann
August 29th, 2005
Home theater done right improves the quality of life. Home theater done wrong makes you wish you'd never been born. Would you rather entertain loved ones or just look like an idiot in front of them? The choice, really, is yours. You may have the big picture and sweet sound of your dreams - or you may blow your investment in any of the following ways:
Top 5 Video Mistakes
Bigger Is Better: Except when it's not. Don't get so fixated on screen size that you ignore viewing distance. For longterm satisfaction, make sure that anything you buy looks good at precisely the distance from screen to sofa—make the measurement and take it to the store. If you're buying a fixed-pixel display (plasma, LCD, rear-projection) you want the dots that produce the picture to be subjectively invisible. It's OK if you see them with your nose smudged against the screen, but as you back into your seat, they should blur together till they disappear. The same goes for the horizontal scan lines on tube-based projectors and direct-view sets. While you're at it, check out off-axis viewing positions when buying an LCD TV—their viewing angle is typically limited. Plasmas are better in that regard but watch out for the screen-door effect—in other words, pixels large enough to be seen from your seat.
Flatter Is Better: Well, OK, flatter is cooler. It may fit better into your home. But strictly speaking, correctly adjusted tube-based displays—for all their problems—still deliver the best picture quality. In high-end home theater, front-projection systems with nine-inch tubes are video's gold standard. In rear-projection, HDTVs with a trio of seven-inch tubes deliver better black level and shadow reproduction than trendier DLP- and LCD-based sets. As an added bonus seven-inch tubes have a real nice way of blurring the scan lines together into a seamless picture. The downside of tubes is that they make for a bulky set, are prone to burn-in from video games, and require both initial calibration and periodic readjustment to look their best. But the old tube may just surprise us all and make an amazing comeback. LG and Samsung have developed direct-view sets with slightly diminished depth—and the best may be yet to come, in the form of a developing SED display technology that mates the tube's traditional black-level performance with a flat form factor.
Ignore the Source: Big mistake. Don't forget that a video display is useless without signal sources. There ought to be a law against people buying giant TVs, then returning them because they can't receive any channels—an executive for a major chain has actually said that out loud. He sounded bitter. If your main source is an antenna, you'll need an ATSC tuner to receive digital channels, including HDTV, and an NTSC tuner to receive analog channels. It can be a shock to discover how many so-called digital TVs lack digital tuners despite federal rules to the contrary. If your main source is cable, get a Digital Cable Ready set, but be warned that the CableCARD standard does not yet support video-on-demand—for that, you'll still need to rent a cable box. Satellite service usually requires a separate receiver and therefore wouldn't limit your choice of display.
If It's Digital, It's HDTV: Oh no it's not. Television hardware and programming can be digital without being high-definition. The DTV standard includes standard-definition formats (480i, 480p) as well as high-definition formats (720p, 1080i). Most DTV stations broadcast SDTV most of the time because the supply of HDTV material is still limited—many of your favorite primetime programs may be in HDTV, but newscasts, older reruns, and much daytime programming is more likely SDTV. The greater snare, for consumers, is that not all DTV hardware supports HDTV. All rear-projection models from major brands are now high-def, but watch out for LCD TVs under 27 inches—some are HD, some not. Incredibly, most traditional single-picture-tube TVs on store shelves are still analog, and even those labeled HDTV rarely support the full resolution of an HD test pattern. If you're just buying a 13-incher for the kitchen counter, you're not likely to care—HDTV is meaningless in such small sizes. But know what you're buying. If a display can't support at least 720 pixels (vertical) by 1280 pixels (horizontal), it's not true HDTV.
Why Touch the Controls? The Picture Looks Great! Anyone who says this about a TV just out of the box probably doesn't know what a good picture looks like. The first thing to fix is the elevated contrast setting—most manufacturers ship sets in "torch mode" to make them pop in the showroom. Then look for a picture preset that lowers the color temperature so that whites don't look so blue. The correct setting may be labeled 6500 (degrees, Kelvin) or just "movie." Depending on the set and signal, it may be necessary to correct the aspect ratio so that widescreen and nonwidescreen programming play in their correct shapes—that is, without stretching, unless you really like misshapen objects.