Ajax9000

Thanks for that. An interesting review in that it actually uses the sort of low- to mid-range hardware many of us look at for a HTPC. Although I would have thought an 8600GT would have been more useful to review than the 8600GTS. The 8x00 XP post-processing results are a pity.

I'm actually getting less tolerant of jitter as I get older. I found jitter to be really bad in some scenes from "Oceans' Eleven" I'm also noticing that more US TV productions seem to be using 30psf, which makes for quite disconcerting motion in action sequences. For example, my wife liked that crappy pseudo-X-Files, "Alias", and I'd notice that the action sequences were much less smooth than I expected.

Well, If you look at the discussion The Ultimate Htpc Graphics Card?, Now with 2nd generation PureVideo, Owen has repeatedly commented (e.g. 1, e.g. 2) that he would go for an 8800 as he doesn't believe in skimping on HTPC parts, he finds the 8800 fairly quiet, he finds the image quality on the 8800 way better than anything else he has used, and he hasn't seen anything to convince him that the newer mid-range cards do better despite the onboard decoding. Basically, he finds that (with a good CPU) the CPU/GPU load balance is irrelevant and it is the GPU image processing that is the key factor. As the PureVideo Support Table notes "Enabling Inverse Telecine, Noise Reduction and Edge Enhancements simultaneously requires additional processing power and may not be possible without dropping frames on some graphics cards" ... and these tend to be the post-porocessing features that are critical to good image quality. I don't always agree with Owen's opinions, but I understand and appreciate where he's coming from. On the other hand. Other than the new 8800GT, the 8800s generaly don't do audio pass through, and I don't think there are m/any with HDMI. However, HDMI is specified to be backwards compatible with DVI, it shouldn't matter ... (notice the emphasis on shouldn't :-) ... Not quite. DVI only does digital RGB without audio. HDMI encodes audio into the blanking intervals and can do other colour spaces.

What is your definition of best? Picture quality? Audio integration? Gaming grunt for a HTPC+gaming rig? Cool and quiet? Or ... ?

Thanks for providing the link to the HDCP license agreement MLXXX. From my reading, the HDCP license agreement is actually fairly generous WRT protected content forwarding. As you say, the problem arises in that the system has to know that when protected content is sent from one part of the computer to another part of the computer that both parts obey the rules. As SPDIF has no DRM handshake, there is an authentication disconnect between the audio sub-unit and the video sub-unit. The ATI approach with the R600 GPUs was to integrate an HD Audio receiver into the GPU, but as they state that the cards only do AC3 at best (which is no better than SPDIF anyway), their implementation is either simplistic, or licence-limited. Shortly after our discussions in topics 48726 and 54467 I found a whole bunch of useful resources on this topic, but I only got half-way through compiling a post detailing it all. I'll try and finish it off soon.

Attacking DCE and Keith Jones isn't very helpful in my opinion. As I said earlier, the DCE paper is essentially just looking at the potential application of the US EPA or UK MTP proposals to Australia. And I think it is a fairly well done research paper from a technical perspective (from a policy development perspective I think less of it). The Comparison.com.au approach has some merit, but it has two main failings. Firstly it uses the manufacturers power consumption figures, which are a poor approximation to actual in-use consumption. The new international test looks a far more reasonable method to use, but Comparison.com.au have said they can't/won't test given their resources. Secondly, the Comparison.com.au approach essentially sets three stars near the current market average. Put another way, there is a better than 50:50 chance that people will pick a TV and it is 3-stars or better. Most people will feel that 3-stars or better is pretty good, and even 2-stars "isn't all that bad" -- i.e. the Comparison.com.au approach sucks as a market transformation driver, all it does is give most people the feeling that their choices are OK. My opinions expressed in post 78 still stand.

LGE press release BTW:- http://www.lge.com/about/press_release/det...RE%7CMENU.jhtml What I find more interesting than the claimed contrast ratio is the emphasis on 50Hz & 100Hz support for countries using PAL systems. Now, 72Hz support would be nice too ...

Bang & Olufsen BeoVision 7 (there were some older models too) ... ~$16000.

That is not correct. Generally speaking, Nvidia 7xxx cards and later, ATI cards X1xxx and later, and Matrox P-series and later can do 1366x768 (but DVI and VGA connections can have different support even on the one card). For example, according to Table A.2 (p.84) of the Forceware 91.47 Release Notes, 1366x768 is now supported at the driver level. See also, http://www.entechtaiwan.net/forums/viewtopic.php?t=20.

Yes, but as I have found with PowerStrip, support for EIA/CEA-861-B timings isn't the same thing as matching exactly the EIA/CEA-861-B timings, which may be a problem in some cases. Of course, the hardware/software combination I'm using is different from the one you are using. So, out of interest, does your PC (not the display EDID) show the correct EIA/CEA-861-B timings when they are selected? Back to the original topic. I presume this would be the model you mentioned in Samsung 63" 1080p Plasma? Because as was discussed in that thread it would be nice to see a real world comparison with the Panasonic 65". Adrian

One would think so, but I have seen more than a few reports of people getting black screens when connecting to Samsung and Panasonic displays (even after exploring advanced timings and even with HDMI-out video cards), so it seems that the manufacturers have worked out a way to do this. I have a hunch that they could be exploiting the fact that most PC timings are based on character clocks of 8 pixels, but CEA sync-pulse timings are based on 4-sample blocks. I raised a question on this in the EnTech forums, but never got an answer.

Eh??? Did a moderator move these here? Ta!

I just had a skim read of the manual, and found a few funny things. Manual still has Samsung's anti-PC-DVI statement (p.7): But on p.14 it says Plus the OSD has "Home theatre PC" options, and there is a whole "Setting up Your PC Software" section.Oddly, p.7 lists 1920x1080p50 and 1920x1080p60 as being supported via HDMI, but pp.14,48,78 only mention 1920x1080p59.934/p60 as available PC HDMI/DVI modes. BTW, I love the way the PDFs' bookmarks are in reverse page order. :-)

I have had a further look at the DCE discussion paper and whilst I now understand how they are doing their analysis, my previous concerns remain. What the consultant did was analyse actual power consumption measurements against suggested US EPA and UK MTP standards. These putative standards take the approach that current energy consumption for televisions is not good, is known to be able to be improved, and so must be improved; thus the suggested standard/star-rating is deliberately designed to give poor rankings to what is currently on the market. In and of itself this is fine (to me), but there is a key problem -- plasmas are inherently much more variable in their power consumption patterns and this makes it hard to give a "fair" energy consumption figure. I.e. it is easy to design a test that will artificially benefit or penalise plasmas. This is fairly well known and the discussion paper has a whole Appendix devoted to the subject. The upshot is that a new international test methodology has been proposed to address the problem. The discussion paper tested 116 CRT, LCD, and Plasma TVs using the new methodology and they found that when energy efficiency is measured as Watts per square cm: They do not publish their raw data but it appears that in statistical terms the average for plasmas falls within the +/- 1 standard deviation range of LCDs and the average for LCDs falls within the +/- 1 standard deviation range of plasmas. (BTW, this is the result from this data set -- http://reviews.cnet.com/4520-6475_7-6400401-3.html -- which used a methodology that is a crude version of the new international test.) The implications of the two sets of results are very important:- the energy consumption pattern of plasmas substantially overlaps that of LCDs. So why then are the reports of this paper scaremongering about plasmas, and make little or no mention of LCD? It gets back to the fact that the report analysed the measurements against the suggested US EPA and UK MTP standards. Under the MTP proposal roughly two-fifths of LCDs fall below the standard for 1-star, and roughly four-fifths of plasmas fail. I.e. the MTP proposal sets the benchmark between the averages of the two technologies. Personally I find this deeply suspicious -- it looks like one technology is deliberately being targeted/penalised and the other favoured. Whilst it could be argued that this is a result of the MTP possibly using the average of the whole population and it is simply plasmas tough luck that on average they fall just below the threshold, as someone who has worked in an environment protection department I can say that good policy development tries to avoid such complications. The US EPA proposal is more balanced in that it places the threshold well below the average for plasma, CRT, and LCD -- i.e. all the technologies are given an equally bad rap. :-) Interestingly, it would appear that rear projection displays would rate in the range 4-star to 6-star under the suggested US EPA and UK MTP standards. (See here for graphs of the cNet data.) As I said, I don't mind the suggested standard/star-rating being deliberately designed to give poor rankings to what is currently on the market. But I do mind the standard/star-rating being designed such that two technologies that perform so similarly are treated differently. I think it would be better if the standard/star-rating was designed such that (say) most current plasmas/LCDs/CRTs rated in the range of 0.5-star to 1.5-star, and most current RP sets rated about 4-stars. Adrian PS The discussion in the middle of the thread Plasma Power Usage, How much will my electricity bill rise???? has some additional power use links.

Graphs for Energy Star Rating For Tvs And Plasma's To Be Banned ? post#77 Power consumption, averages, and 1&2 standard deviations (cNet data) UK MTP star ratings for cNet data US EPA star ratings for cNet data

The discussion paper looks at US and UK programs, the EU wasn't mentioned specifically but I'm sure they are on to it too.

The Blackle concept is crap. Minor improvements for CRT, f-all for LCD as the backlight is the main power user.

I've has a brief scan of the discussion paper and the remarkable thing is not that there is a proposal to do this to address market failure (a pretty basic reason for government intervetion), but the way that the bar has been set to zero-rate most plasmas but 1-star most LCDs. If there was a big difference it could be understandable, but the energy consumption profiles of the two sets of products substantially overlap (which the paper explicityly notes), and setting the criteria this way is deeply sus.

Here is the actual discussion paper ... all 166 pages ... http://www.energyrating.gov.au/library/pub...s-labelling.pdf

That's fine. But they are at the wrong price point at the moment if that's their aim (c.f. DaVillan's comment, and the B&O example) -- their volume-price-cost balance isn't balanced.

Company websites, company newsletters (I get the Pioneer e-newsletter), industry newsletters (I get the TWICE e-newsletter), etc. In terms of going into stores I don't do it much anymore.

Yes and yes :-) , but ... Quite a few of us know what we want and so don't need to go to a specialist store, but marketing strategies like this don't give us the option. And frankly, some of the "specialist" stores still have assistants that are biased/opinionated/stupid. As an example, I had a lovely conversation a few years ago with the manager of the (now defunct) DME HiFi shop in George St Sydney. It was going nicely until he insisted that the Pioneer plasmas were the best on the market because they were the only ones that didn't need to do image scaling on video signals ... WTF? There are precisely zero video formats of 1280x786. Bad comparison me thinks. Lexus is new and growing with the up-market strategy, Pioneer is established and struggling with the up-market strategy. Markets change and marketing strategies need to be adaptable. I'm not sure Pioneer has been all that smart over the past 3 years. Adrian

Yes, I'm rather looking forward to seeing the Pana-tachi 85" ... (Not that I'm holding my breath about being able to afford it :-)

I think Pioneers problem is not that it is selling a premium product at a premium price, rather it isn't selling a product with a sufficiently high perceived value for the price. Consider B&O, they have a very small market share and their products are very expensive. Whether or not their products are technically good or not (as is regularly argued over) is irrelevant -- their perceived value to their market segment is sufficiently high that they can get away with being a high-price/low-volume niche player. In contrast, Pioneer seemingly can't match other players in terms of their perceived value -- Panasonic & Hitachi: good (but not great) tech plus moderate price, LG: moderate tech plus moderately-low price, clones: OK tech plus low price. Sorry, comments here make it clear that Pioneer does have a good perceived value, so I'll put that differently. Pioneer seemingly can't match other players in terms of their perceived value without lowering their prices below their cost-base (which is comparatively high because they are a relatively small, vertically integrated manufacturer). Adrian

Market Segmentation and Channel Marketing is part of Marketing 101 (actually MGSM820 in my case :-), and Pioneer has every right to use exclusive channels to target high-value segments. BUT Exclusive marketing is only good if you can do so profitably. The news item above was interesting for two reasons. It notes Sharp's share price dropping after the announcement and Pioneer's rising -- indicating the market viewed it as good for Pionner, but not Sharp. Now why would that be? Possibly due to an important piece of information not reported by current.com.au (but was elsewhere e.g. at TWICE) ... "Pioneer, which has seen three consecutive years of losses, posting a net loss of $58.6 million in fiscal 2006, will use the $189 million net gain from the capital tie-up with Sharp to rebuild operations including the plasma TV business, ... ". I.e. Pioneer is not doing well at the moment, and I'd suggest that using exclusive channels to target high-value segments may not be such a good idea right now.