Sony Trinitron KV2201UB

[Murphyv310]

Yes I certainly agree with viewing distances, screen size and whether SD or HD.
On a vintage "bent" my Decca 1000 was fired up yesterday for the first time for a year, it came on first time with no adjustments required. I positioned the 60" screen and walked the 10 metres from the screen to the back door and the picture was fine, perfectly clear.
Go to the set which is around 9 feet away from the set and its grim.............. mind you it is 405 lines!!

[Mike Watterson]

The mistake most people seem to make is buying an LCD that is too big. In effect, they are sitting too close to the picture. In my small lounge, my 28" CRT (~26" visible) is about right. If you get closer, Freeview MPEG artefacts become apparent (though you can get closer when playing DVDs). I think that 32" might be OK with the better Freeview channels, and definitely DVDs, but then flicker will start to become an issue (100Hz CRT sets were universally terrible in my experience). 

I guess I'll have to make the move one day, and perhaps 40" would be about right for HD. Shame it'll be too big for SD though. Though given that we're not big TV viewers, I'm hoping the CRTs will give us another decade at least

I find it a shame that my TV doesn't have two levels of "zoom out", one for ordinary SD and one for VHS!
The better quality WS DVDs are quite good up-scaled to 1920 x 1080.
Our DVD player has 1440 x 576 and 1440 x 480 progressive component out. The TV has VGA, Y/C, composite, RGB SCART, component and three or four HDMI. Good luck trying to find more than SCART and  2 x HDMI now. Or even analogue audio out!
Too many older films on DVD are being sold in high street / Tesco etc that are encoded for USA market, only 480 lines, so a 30% quality reduction. Chaplin collection.
I have one Film to DVD transfer that crazily is interlaced "NTSC style" on the disk instead of progressive and letting the DVD player interlace (if required), as a result it has the motion comb artefacts!

Some people also have too small a TV. For UK average viewing distance and quality of vision, about 34" would be right for decent SD. Very much broadcast SD is now far poorer than Analogue due to over compression. Also very many WS SD channels running about 544 x 576 resolution to save money.

Never mind the the quality (picture OR content!) you have 100s of channels!

So I'd like a projector with a motorised screen and mask and remote controlled Zoom lens for 28" (4:3) to 72" (3:1) approx (Ben Hur is 2.7:1 ratio!)

[Murphyv310]

Hi.
Did any of you watch the Documentary on the ITV Network about the "Young wives of Aberfan"?
There was a lot of footage from the disaster of 1966. We watched it on STV HD (40" Samsung) and the film clips were stunningly sharp, even the 405 line footage didn't seem doctored in anyway, the 405 line structure could be clearly seen, more so on the bottom third of the screen but the quality of the picture was still good enough to watch on a WS 40" set. Now I'm fully aware that a 40" WS set would have a similar screen height to a 23 4:3 CRT so in the vertical plane watching a 405 line transmission on my 40 WS set isn't hugely different to say a 23 or 25 inch 405 line set. The horizontal resolution is virtually identical on 405 to 625.

[Mike Watterson]

'40" WS set would have a similar screen height to a 23 4:3 CRT'
I think rather more.

But it is true that 17" 405 is similar visual Resolution to some HDTVs and on 12" the 405 lines is effectively HD quality.

Japan and USA drove the development of HD. It WAS to have larger screens, not "better" quality. The 525 lines looked pretty bad on their 36" and larger 4:3 screens. USA had larger CRTs than were ever commonly seen here and very many projection TVs at home.

The quality of content (in visual sense) is much more variable than 30 years ago. Digital allows trade off between cost & lower quality, almost never "better" quality than best PAL, unless you have HD on a screen with so called full HD, but only a little larger than an ideal SD screen size.

[pwdrive]

I remember seeing a 1,000 line demo at Evoluon back in the '60's.

Lawrence.

[Murphyv310]

I remember seeing a 1,000 line demo at Evoluon back in the '60's.

Lawrence.

The French 819 line system was the first real HD service.