This question was received in my Private Message:
Quote:
I thought it was pretty interesting what you wrote about the Toshiba 30HF83 and Im having a hard time understanding the compatibility of it. Since I read you work for Zenith home theater I thought I would message you for your professional opinion.
Right now I have an 15 year old GE 27" TV and a Cyber Home CH-DVD 500 DVD player. Im looking to upgrade into HDTV so I can watch DVD's in progressive scan.
The price on the Toshiba is $799 @ Amazon and has me basically sold except for its "auto upgrade" logic.
Based on the spec sheet it seems me at least that it takes all signals and converts them to 1080i?
And if you want, you can set the TV to a different setting to view it in that?
The CyberHome plays in 480p from what I hear in the gaming world you tend to see jagged edges. Does the same hold true for dvd's, I dont think so but I wanted to hear from some one who has experitise in this field. I think the games are subject to animation and other flaws that dvd's dont carry, but that will be confirmed or denied by you I suppose.
Lastly, how would you rate this TV, honestly?
I know the Cyberhome is far from the enthusiast choice but would it be a proper match to this TV? Is 480p good for viewing dvd's?
And how will this tv stand the test of time, does it have features to keep it relevant for the next 10 years at least?
Im so sorry for all the quesitons, its really greedy of me but online reviews of this content and the tv itself seem to be very scarce. If you would assist me with any of these things, I would be very much appreciative. Thank you for your time.
heres a link to the Tobisha spec sheet:
http://www.tacp.toshiba.com/pdf/30hf83.pdf
heres the CyberHome DVD player link:
http://www.cyberhome.com/products.asp?Product=500
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I like Toshiba TVs in general and my previous wide screen TV was a Toshiba. To correct one thing you stated in your question, I don't work for Zenith Home Theater, my company is a Zenith Home Theater dealer, which means we sell Zenith equipment. We sell other brands as well.
Back to the TV. As direct view TV go, I think the Toshiba is about as good as is available. The problem with direct view TVs is they do not give you the relavent specs you need to fully evaluate the sets. This is true for CRT type rear projection sets as well. To know what the final resolution (and therefore the picture quality) would be, we need to know the dot pitch of the picture tube. This is readilly available for CRT based computer monitors as it is very important spec to decide whether a particular resolution will work on a given monitor. Basically if the dot pitch is larger that what will fit in your screen while viewing a HDTV picture, then your picture will not be at full HDTV resolution. A good computer monitor would have a .28mm dot pitch. Most TV CRTs will be in the order of .48mm dot pitch. For 1920 pixels wide that translates to 921mm (36.28") of width required. For the 1080 pixels high you are looking at 518mm (20") for the height. Since the CRT size for the TV you are looking at is a 30" diagonal, there would not be enough dots to make the full HDTV resolution of 1920w x 1080h.
I have verified this on my Zenith multimedia TV that will actually only go to 800w x 600h resolution even though it will receive a 1080i HDTV signal. But don't dispair because the other part of the puzzle is that most broadcasts are not to the full 1920 x 1080 either. Most sources say what they send out as viewable video is more like 1380 x 1035. To boil it down, most likely the Toshiba you have chosen will give you as good an HDTV picture as you will get on any direct view set.
Now to the DVD, the video data on the DVD is encoded 480i data and the DVD will upconvert during the mpeg decompression process to 480p. Send this into the Toshiba and it will upconvert to 1080i for display. I think you will be pleased with the result. You would need to have a much larger picture before you would need to worry about picture quality, imo.