Originally Posted by Glathannus
One of my ongoing missions is to dispel the notion that LCD is the herald of all things new and cool - which is an especially common belief among people who take Apple gear seriously.
When somebody mentions an "HDTV", it should not automatically mean or imply LCD. Many of the earliest high definition televisions were CRTs. There even exist some CRT-based HDTVs that can display 1080p. "CRT" and "HD" are not mutually exclusive.
I would think that CRTs would have huge advantages over LCD when it comes to high definition, because some channels or programs might be offered in 1080p while others are only offered in 720p or 480p. If the lower-resolution material isn't getting upscaled, that means an LCD-based HDTV isn't always running in its native resolution. All LCD displays have one specific resolution they want to do, and if you stray away from that, they look bad because the content doesn't conform to the grid of one reserved diode for every possible pixel. Since 1080p is not fully adopted throughout all material in the world, you would want a display that could handle different resolutions. I believe plasma is the only "flat panel" that can do this (pfft - as if there's no such thing as CRTs that are at least flat on the front).
Don't spend any money on an LCD display unless you're only ever going to be looking at it from one angle, and if the screen is always going to be fed the same resolution it wants. Even then, make sure you get one that's fast.
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I always thought that CRTs were the only displays without a native resolution. A quick search pulled up an article that confirms that plasma displays do have a native resolution.
From
a cnet article: "Nearly every HDTV sold today is a fixed-pixel display. A fixed-pixel display is any HDTV or monitor that uses discrete pixels to produce an image, including flat-panel LCD and plasma screens as well as rear-projection microdisplays and front projectors that use DLP, LCD, or LCoS technology. We'll ignore non-fixed-pixel displays, namely direct-view CRTs, because they treat incoming resolutions differently than their fixed-pixel cousins do--since they don't use discrete pixels, their specifications are much more difficult to pin down. They're also basically extinct as a product category."
Oh, and I like Apple products but am no big LCD fan. I still use a 21" CRT. I am looking forward to laser DLP maturing and becoming cheaper because of the wide color gamut, excellent contrast ratio and saturation, lack of mechanical color wheel contraptions bla bla bla. Some Apple users actually know what they are talking about.
FWIW,
all early HDTV was CRT. NHK was developing their first analog system in the late 1960's, decades before the introduction of flat panel technologies. I'm also pretty certain that LCDs don't use diodes. Applied electric fields change the optical properties of thin liquid crystal films.