I wondered if anyone had experience with TVs that work well with the Wii? Basically, the requirements are really slim:
-Support component inputs
-Supports at least the 480p resolution (is EDTV the term for that?)
-Should be widescreen/have a 16:9 ratio (I think some games support 4:3 only but the majority seem to be fine with 16:9)
My Wii looks awful on my Hitachi 53UWX10BA through component. But granted, so do the Xbox 360 and PS3 because it's a rather old television that supports 540p/1080i max. I'm thinking about replacing that television with something nicer, but that's mainly for the 360 and PS3's sake.
I have an old Sony PVM 2030 which is a "professional grade" (oh, how fancy!) monitor used back in the day by television studios and as medical monitors (I see some on sale for medical purposes on eBay still, don't know if anyone in the field actually uses them though). For gaming purposes it has inputs for analog RGB so it's great for making old systems look awesome, but the S-Video support on it is really good too. I ran the Wii through S-Video on this television and it looked quite a bit better than the Hitachi HD/EDTV, even though it was running at 480i opposed to 480p.
So does anyone run their Wii through a cheaper, smaller television with 480p support? Are there any solid recommendations (considering both price and picture quality)? Thanks for any help, it's appreciated!
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I always think the Wii looks best on CRTs that take component cables, though. Doesn't even have to be 480p. I'm not even joking, the natural fuzziness is like free antialiasing. No More Heroes looks fine on my 20" CRT Philips but awful and jaggy on my friend's 36" LCD TV.
I believe the Wii does 480i without component cables and 480p with, so you'd want your basic, non-HD TV in the first case and an EDTV without. When I was researching this for myself a while ago I didn't want to spend much on a TV, which was an issue because finding a used EDTV is a pain in the ass. But if you're willing to buy new I'm sure you could find one.
However, you're only likely to care about lag to the point of buying a different TV to avoid it if you regularly play a game that requires really good reflexes. So if you're a competitive SSBM player, then yeah, probably try to track down an EDTV. But that chances of that are slim, so you can probably just buy whatever you want and deal with the ~10ms of lag you're likely to see.
I don't follow the latest TV news or anything but it's getting pretty hard to find new CRTs anywhere but online, outside of the cheapo small ones. I searched on Amazon and it does look like there are still some that are considered new, even HD and widescreen, but they're expensive.
http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=CRT+TV
Before you commit to anything you should ask around with friends and relatives and see if anyone has a good CRT you can try it on to see if you like the look of it.
when I was researching this for myself I found this smashboards post really useful
it's smash-focused, but everything the guy says should still apply to any fighting game, I think
http://cgi.ebay.com/PS3-Wii-VGA-TV-PC-Box-Switch-SAV-AV-New-Mayflash_W0QQitemZ170437944696
From the description it seems that only 480p would work, which would be fine but it would be nice to have something that supported all resolutions as I think there's a few games that do not support 480p. From what I've read in various reviews it seems like VC games would still be okay but I know there's a lot of GCN titles that run in only 480i. For the 480i content I could always switch to S-Video, but I'd like to avoid that.
And about the letterbox mode: I think that would be great. Much better than a squished picture and I wouldn't mind the "blank" space. So I'll definitely need to make sure if a potential 4:3 CRT I purchase is capable of that. But if they support component then that should be pretty common, right?
EDIT: This older Sony Wega looks perfect, I might need to find something like it... http://dallas.craigslist.org/ndf/ele/1569062323.html