p e n g u i n d e v i l

One of the big questions this fall is all around our television/monitor setup. Currently we have a nice 26″ (or is it 27″) crt television and a 21″ crt monitor. There is a move afoot to switch to a single screen, and an lcd one to boot. Part of the issue with this has been that I have no experience with such a beast, except for looking at the Alien DVD menu at Kurty’s… Until now.

The folks here have a 27″ Akia TV and so I spent a little time checking it out. First thing, they had it set to “fill” or “full” or something, so the picture (Charter cable via Tivo) looks bad, like a stretched out old VHS picture. Even when you switch it to 4:3 the picture still looks bad. There is one HD broadcast channel that they can pick up, NBC, and this morning the Today Show on it looked grand, a big full widescreen picture, rich and the right ratio to fill the screen with no stretching or anything. Now this doesn’t make much difference to me, as I can’t generally stand tv, cable or otherwise. But occasionally I like to watch PBS and if the HD PBS that we get at home looks like this, that seems quite nice. I’m also not too concerned with using it for a computer, as the screen is big enough to replace my screen (which honestly, could easily be smaller with no bother to me)

The issue is, of course, movies. I want to watch them in the correct ratio, and have them be larger than my current viewing set-up. I tried checking out the different DVD realities here, but I don’t feel confident that I really learned the deal. Nearly all of their DVD’s are fullscreen (I always wondered who bought those) and though I don’t have very many of those, there seem to be two viewing options: 4:3, in which case they are much smaller then they would be on our current TV, or stretched out, which doesn’t look good. Widescreen DVD’s (non-anthropomorphic) basically end up being very small, as they appear, bars and all, in a little 4:3 box in the center of the screen. It seems that in these cases, we would be dropping a lot of picture size with this switch.

The anthropomorphic widescreen DVD’s, on the other hand, seem like they might work out. Though using a 16:9 TV, the differences of the various widescreen formats becomes very apparent. Basically, the issue is that if all of the DVD’s were anthropomorphic widescreens at a 16:9 ratio, it seems like a TV like this would be a great improvement, but I fear that with a lot of things (maybe everything but HD tv and anthropomorphic DVD’s), we would be losing a lot of viewing area.

Anyway, I didn’t have much time to really dig around, so these feelings are all from a cursory examination. It seems to me that a 27″ (which would be the most convenient to buy) won’t cut it and that we may need to think about a 32″ LCD. I am curious about the experiences of anyone (who is a dvd watcher, concerned with picture quality and image size) who has switched from a CRT to an LCD.