satcrazy said:
I know nothing about edge lit or backlit lcd's either. Someone posted that "edgelit is not good because of "flashlighting" whatever that means.
So what about the importance of refresh rate? [ I watch series and movies mostly in the BR]
I do not want to go backwards here [ at least not in a big way] Meaning buying a lcd, and then realizing it's nothing like my plasma. Yup, I'm sploiled.
My bedroom is dark, and normally I set the sleep timer [ normally, not 100%]
That news ticker your talking about, are you reffering to plasma burn-in? I thought lcd doesn't have that issue.
Oh, and the other thought is lcd is cheaper to operate [ electric]
1) Edgelit vs. true backlit.
All LCDs work by shining light thru a liquid crystal substrate. Until recently, the back lighting was performed by a CCF (Cold Cathode Fluorescent) bulb. The long thin bulb was positioned at the top and side and uses an etched diffusion layer to distribute the light evenly behind the LC panel. The problem is it doesn't really distribute the light perfectly evenly. This is the "flashlighting" you speak of. If a perfectly black image is shown on the screen, what you get is some areas of the screen are black, other areas of the screen are slightly lighter than black (where light bleeds thru at angles). Kind of looks like a haze on the screen in areas.
When LED is used for the backlighting in a 'edgelit' setup, all it's doing is replacing the CCF light along the edges with a row of LEDs. You still have all the same problems with uneven lighting as with CCF (actually the problem can even be a little more pronounce using LED).
With a true backlit LCD panel using LEDs, there are dozens (even hundreds) of LEDs that are used directly behind the panel. Since the ratio of LED to pixels is not perfect, light diffusion has to take place as well. With displays that don't use that many LEDs in the backlighting, that means more issues of hotspotting (uneven illumination). But having a panel lit with LED directly from behind (especially on the more expesive models that use a lot of LEDs) allows for a feature called 'local dimming'. Depending on the manufacture it can actually be called many different things (got to love those P.O.S. marketing departments - making it hard for anyone to know the truth about anything). With local dimming, increased contrast can be achieved. As well as less light bleed thru.
However, at some point shady cheap companies will be ready to offer "true backlit LED" TV's to ride the new wave of hot marketing terms. These cheap TVs will perform like crap and not have enough LEDs in the backlight for proper uniformity (you can already find this in the cheap edgelit junk out there by these same manufactures). And there will be customers lined up to take the bait.
2) Refresh rate.
LCDs have the inherent problem of blurry images when things are in motion. To help combat this, engineers raised the refresh rate of the display. This only helped a little. But with the refresh rate at 120Hz, this did make it possible to display 24Hz content properly without adding or dropping frames. Anything over 120Hz is pretty much marketing B.S. Most displays look cartoonish when you turn the feature on as well. A lot of people don't mind the weird look over the little extra bit of clarity they get (especially on sports). YMMV.
3) Your viewing habits for the bedroom (lighting, etc...) would put a plasma as your best investment for that size range (42"+). Getting an LCD "would" be a step back. I asked about the news ticker thing because of the issue you might run into with plasma, not LCD. Again, doesn't sound like that would be an issue for you.
4) Power consumption.
Todays plasmas are a lot more energy efficient than they were just a few years ago. Although still not as good as LCD, it isn't bad. Who would really complain over an extra $5 per month of electricity a plasma would use over an LCD of the same size?
