The Best Buy and Circuit City salesmen are always pushing the Monstor Cables for use with my HDtv but are they really necessary or is their another brand that is just as effective and less costly?
grfunk
Unregistered guest
Posted on
YES. Just buy good quality cables and you will be fine. Best Buy sells Acoustic Research, a giant step down in cost type cables that will work. I'm a tech and I've done tests. If you don't believe that there is no difference in cables then buy both and return the ones you don't like. I would never buy Monster Cable. Unless you have some really nice test equipment, you'll never see or hear a difference. You can also get very good cables on the internet. Just do a search. There is no need to pay for Monster Cable.
Anonymous
Posted on
grfunk, Can you share your thoughts on DLP vs rear projection LCD?
grfunk
Unregistered guest
Posted on
I had the Samsung DLP and Sony 655 LCD in my house. I piped everything from HD to VHS through both of them. The Samsung looked great on HD but really looked bad on SD signals unless it was a very, very good SD signal like the NFL Network when they did live shows from the studio. Other things looked waxy like 3rd generation VHS dubs. The Sony LCD looked great on everything. I kept the Sony. I would have liked to have kept the DLP because I saw so many at the CES in 2004 but the picture quality just wasn't there in SD for Samsung. Don't really like the color wheel either. I'm a 30 year broadcast engineer and that sort of seemed like going backwards in technology. I know the downfalls of both DLP and LCD as discused so much on these boards but I figure I would take the chance on LCD. I think the viewing angle in also much better on LCD. All of this is just my opinion sinch I was able to have both of these TVs in my house and could do any test I wanted. The Sony also has the HD tuner in it which is great and also the ATSC tuner for direct cable is cool too. I get Video on Demand signals for some reason. 40 digital channels of Video on Someone elses Demand.
Anonymous
Posted on
LCD is great and LCD projection great value for the money, and I too noticed the viewing angle is also excellent on my LCD, in my case a front projector, the Panasonic AE700U. You can be even beyond 45 degrees with no problem at all, quite a change from the big box CRTs a few years back
Nic
Unregistered guest
Posted on
grfunk, several of us are 655 owners and like to tweak the settings. While the service menu is beyond us, could you post your user settings? Any fine tuning would be greatly appreciated. Thanks
grfunk
Unregistered guest
Posted on
Actually, I didn't have to do much tweaking with this set. I have a DVD with some test signals on it but I only needed the 75% color bar signal. I've set up monitors at work for 30 years and just know what they are suppose to look like. Everybody has a different eye so some of it is subjective. If you have the color bar signal handy with the two black bars within the black section, it is really easy so set up color, hue, brightness and contrast. There is a link somewhere to a place that sells a setup DVD that is good for this. There really isn't any magic in setting up this TV. No need to get into any hidden menus or anything like that. Once you get your reference signal set up, you'll find that with all the different channels you get on your TV, most of them will look good. The ones that look bad will be just that content or channel and you're not going to be able to do much about it. I come from the technical side of program production. I know how things can get screwed up to make a program look bad.