I got myself a big present this year. So big in fact, it took my mother’s minivan and a friend from work to help bring it in and setup.
That’s right, it’s a new TV!
I got my last TV, Samsung DLP2, about 5 years ago and it’s had some constant issues with turning on. But this last couple of weeks, it got progressively worse. It was taking between 5 and 30 minutes to get the thing to turn on. You’d think it was the bulb, but no, it has something to do with a heat sensor.
I would have to try hitting the power multiple times, and sometimes resort to unplugging the power cord for 10 minutes. After that, it starts up again. I’d almost believe that most people would just assume a bulb failure and go out and buy an expensive replacement.
It also began turning itself off after 10 to 30 minutes of use. Thankfully, I found some forum posts which instructed me on how to fix that with some masking tape. Don’t ask 🙂
But, since I didn’t want to go through the holidays with a TV that could completely die at any time and with holiday prices everywhere, it was time to get a new one.
My choice was for a 60″ Sony Bravia EX700 series with 1080p LED backlit LCD. My mother got a Sony Bravia a year or two ago and I’ve been drooling over how much better the picture was over my current Samsung. And this new one is no different.
The box was HUGE! I knew that delivery wouldn’t make it for Christmas, so I asked my mother for her minivan. Once seeing the box though, we were skeptical if it could fit. Thankfully, you can lay these boxes on their side (as long as the back of the TV is on the bottom). Moving some seats up and it fit in perfectly. It would have fit in a standing position if we had 1″ more space in the door.
My friend, Rick, helped us unload it at my house and get it setup. Thankfully, it came pre-assembled with the stand attached so we just had to lift it off the box bottom and set it on the TV stand. One power cord, one HDMI, and it was ready to go.
Turned on with no issues (thank God). Went through the setup and skipped most things since I didn’t have cable connected to the TV itself. But we did run into a big snag when trying a blu-ray disc. It completely screwed up the picture!
The picture was jumping, or tearing from the top right. A very strange video affect. At this point I was panicking since I didn’t want to try and get it back to the store. Thought I’d do some research first. None of my HD devices had a problem displaying on the TV.
After doing some late night web research, I found one comment in a 2000 comment article that mentioned to look in the Video Settings section of the PS3 for the BD options. Turns out the PS3 was outputting all BD content in 1080/24p format. The TV supports this, but apparently there are issues in the way the PS3 does it which causes many HD televisions to have problems. Turning this feature off fixed my problems.
The only downside to this fix is that I think the picture while watching a movie can look a little too TV’ish now. That’s what the 1080/24p was fixing. My old TV didn’t have this problem since it was limited to 720p.
My impressions so far are “WOW”. The picture is so clear it is amazing. Though, I am thinking this can be one drawback of HD content. All my old favorite Sci-Fi movies look like they’re using plastic models. The Enterprise looks like a model now instead of a ship. The scenes in Aliens with the ships all look drawn or modeled. Later movies with CGI have too crisp of pictures. You can really tell when they didn’t take focus into account when doing scenes. Distant objects should not be in the same focus as close ones. Guess I’ll just have to live with that though 🙂
Downloaded content is a mixed bag. I don’t download stuff in HD because I don’t need HD to enjoy a TV show. Series that I do like, I buy in DVD or blu-ray. The Bravia can really show MPEG artifacting though in some of the older DIVX content. My Samsung used DLP with square pixels on screen so this was blended out. This TV is very sharp and you can see some of that again. Turning on some motion options on the TV does help. The PS3 also does some work to up-convert content to HD quality and it does make a difference when I compare the output with my WDTV Live box. In some cases, you’d think that the old shows were actually shot with an HD camera!
Stuff off the Shaw cable box are great as usual. Though, I was disappointed that the FRAME channel has decided to just show that log fire all day long now. They normally show real nice scenery pictures from around the country and that is what really made my mother’s Sony TV look so good. When I viewed the channel on my Samsung screen, they were half the brightness and looked dead. Her’s were bright and alive.
Anyway, I should wrap this up and go start watching a bunch of movies!