Engineering News

You can't even give rear projection TVs away around here. Seen them sitting in front of people's homes along the road for weeks. Trash truck won't even take them.

That's funny and true.

I bought a 65" RP TV for $3,200.00. Used it for 5 years, it was working perfectly, and couldn't get $500.00 for it.

My 6 year old SONY LCD RP still performs great. I've changed one bulb, that's it. One thing of note is the sound out of these units is head and shoulders above what comes out of the new thin units. I know, duh, but the sound quality makes the 720p a much better viewing experience than my similar 1080 lcd.

I like RP, but they are massive and take up lots of room. Plus, who likes replacing bulbs on their tv?

Better to replace a bulb than a TV. What do you do with a CFL-driven LCD when its backlight goes out?

I thought this was a site for engineers!

;-)

Seriously, though, there are very significant differences between RPTVs based on their core technology. While I would not own a CRT-based set (I do have a CRT gun from an old Sony in my office), I may keep an LCD-based HDTV in the basement if I had one, and I would be happy with a DLP-based 6-color 52-inch HDTV RPTV in my living room. DLP, sadly the only American-based HDTV tech left, is an excellent display system, and an RPTV with a replaceable bulb will last as long as your house.

Having said that, an LED-driven LCD is probably the best thing out there for TV until OLED gets over its packaging and aging issues. But for bang for buck, DLP RPTV is tough to beat.

The best TVs today for the price are LED lit LCD. Plasma is better but more expensive and prone to missing oixels after a certain usage.

All RPs should be burnt at the stake, not good. Its basically only a Video projectoor in a box.....

Watch out for at least 5 msec update or faster, and as high contrast ratio as possible.......

A good test is to make a video of a lawn (cut grass), track slowly, watch on the TV, if the blades of grass "pump", don't buy the TV!!!!!

Well, DLP has a 16 microsecond response speed.

That maybe, but there is a lot of other things in the signal path that are the real problem.

Rear projection is sort of like CRT. Nobody wants them any more and you can't give them away because they are so inferior in picture quality compared to today's technology.

That being said, we use an HD projector, which is not so much better, but we probably only watch something two or three times a month. Frankly, there simply isn't much in the way of good and intelligent programming out there to make it worth while spending large amounts of cash on a video system nor do I want some behemoth in my room.

We have simply found more fun activities to do in life than watch TV.