Just an FYI on some of the points made in this thread. I work in ultra high end home theater and automation, i’ve been in the industry for over 10 years and am the sales manager for one of the larger firms in the city I currently live in.
Contrast ratios used by TV manufacturers are not real numbers, it’s not like horsepower in a car where there’s set industry standards that companies have to abide by, if you knew how some of those companies measure dynamic contrast ratios it would probably blow you away. Contrast ratio is the difference between black and white, the proper way to measure it is to have both black and white on the TV at the same time and measure the difference. To get dynamic contrast they will put the TV in a totally dark room, shut it off, and measure that as “black”, then they will turn the TV on a white image, put it on dynamic picture mode, crank the back light to max, crank the contrast to max and measure that as white. The contrast numbers you will get from that test are useless to you because they are not real world numbers. Just to give you an idea of how out to lunch those numbers are, most people cannot differentiate a true contrast ratio of 1000:1 or above.
In theory LED LCD tvs should have better contrast ratios, but in reality most don’t. The reasoning behind this is simple, when LCD’s first came out they had a light behind the LCD panel that is always on, it cannot be shut off. Think of it this way, if you take a flashlight, turn it on, and put a blue shirt over it, the light will be blue. If you do the same with a red shirt, the light will be red. Think of what happens when you try that with a black shirt, you can’t make black bright so you don’t really have a true black. When LEDs LCDs first came out and were supposed to be all the rage it was because they would put dozens and dozens of LED lights all behind the screen equally spaced all around the TV, if a certain part of the TV screen was supposed to show a dark scene (think Indiana Jones walking into a dark cave, but it’s bright outside the cave) they could dim just those LEDs behind the dark part of the picture to improve contrast ratio. This is called “Localized dimming LED backlighting”
Instead, what ended up happening is they figured out they could put LEDs around the EDGE of the screen and create TVs that were super super thin, although these were not able to be dimmed locally like the original LED LCD TVs so they kind of ruined the whole point of LED backlighting. My guess is TV manufacturers went this route because in stores all TVs are set up far to bright and in the dynamic picture mode, so having local dimming would make the TV look darker on the showroom floor, but human eyes are naturally attracted to the brighest set on the wall when you look at a bunch of TVs at once so it made sense from a sales perspective.
The newest and top of the line generation of LED LCD TVs claim to have edge lit LED lighting, but are able to mimmick localized dimming LEDs, but just like the whole contrast ratio fiasco, it’s more of a marketing gimmick then anything else.
This is why Plasma TV’s still have the best contrast ratio and picture quality, because with a plasma pixel when you are not feeding it any electricity it’s not glowing, therefor it is really as close to black as you can get. They will not give you that ultra bright image you get from an LCD but you will have a much more natural image with far more realistic colours. Although the burn in issue has become far less of an issue than it ever was before, it can still happen so use caution if you go this route, the TV will be far more likely to be burned in the brighter you have it. Dynamic picture mode is a serious no no if you don’t want to burn an image into your screen. That being said if a plasma TV is properly calibrated it should take over 100 hours to get permanent burn in.
And no, you don’t have to recharge a plasma TV. I’ve never in my life heard of this actually being done and to my knowledge it’s not even possible.
If you get used to a properly calibrated TV you’ll never ever ever be able to watch a TV in dynamic picture mode. I live in Calgary, Alberta, Canada and am very lucky to have met Michael Chen and have seen his work first hand, he is one of the pioneers of ISF calibration for TVs and people will actually fly him all over North America to calibrate their TVs to the best and most realistic image possible. He has calibrated most of the TVs in our showroom and the difference is night and day compared to the out of the box settings. He is very highly recommended on AVSforum and you’ll find that a lot of those “optimal settings” like the one posted above were obtained from someone who had their TV calibrated by Michael or another ISF calibrator.
I hope the above information will be of some help to you.
Regards,
Mark
