Thursday, March 1, 2007

TV DOESN'T LOOK GOOD IN THE STORE!!!

You read a review for a potential TV purchase, and all fingers are pointing towards this one particular set. You get to the store and it looks horrible. Why aren't things adding up? Were the reviews off their mark?

More than likely the problem is the fact that when you go to your local electronics store, they don't have a direct source going to each tv. This means they don't have a DVD player or Blu-Ray player for EACH tv like you would at home. They have one source (player) and split it over however many tv are there. Imagine, 50 tv's and one dvd player. When this is done, the signal quality going to each screen is heavily degraded. Add to this, the fact that store's literally pull the tv out of the box and set it up as is, no calibration (see this article why calibration is so important), just some basic menu setting changes. What you're left with is a fairly poor representation of each displays capabilities.


When buying an HDTV, it's always a good idea to have the sales people hook up a Blu-Ray or HD-DVD player directly to the display you're interested in. As long as the store isn't too busy, they're usually happy to oblige. High end audio/video stores are almost always happy to do this. Although the display isn't calibrated, you get a much better idea of what the picture will look like at home.

2 Comments:

Anonymous said...

You are right! I don't understand why they do not try to hook up less TV to have more quality.

TriniMan said...

Thanks Mao for the comment. You're right! If you go to more specialist stores such as "The Great Indoors" "Tweeter" or "Magnolia" they're more inclined to hook up the players directly to the HDTV, but more consumers aren't aware that split signal equals lower performance.