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[PA Comic] Friday, November 28, 2014 - Values
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
[PA Comic] Friday, November 28, 2014 - Values
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It actually makes a lot of difference if you play very dark games like Amnesia, Alien or Dark Souls.
With TVs, I at least know what everything means so I can avoid getting something truly crappy. However, I also avoid the super expensive TVs because I don't feel what they offer is worth the kind of money they ask. With TVs it seems like you're damned if you do and damned if you don't nowadays, my first flat screen was a 720p because I didn't know as much about the stats back then. Everything looked nice enough for me to be satisfied, but when it died, I upgraded to 1080p. Now I will admit that the blu-rays look much better, but now many of my older DVDs look like crap. Just can't win....except maybe if you buy the super expensive TVs.
I do hate comparison shopping in most things though. I never do the "shop around" thing. I may not buy the cheapest item/service available (in fact, I probably wouldn't), but I do usually just buy it at the first place I decide to go.
-Tycho Brahe
Things are cheap for a reason. It's because they use shitty parts and are expected to fail.
But both people are absolutely convinced the other one is an idiot.
That's a good philosophy if you want a crappy TV with dying pixels, shitty resolution, and really long response time.
Personally I like a good picture and minimal input lag, so the quality of the monitor is actually pretty important.
A bad TV can cut off large portions of the screen edges while offering you no way to fix it.
This right here is the problem I encountered the one time I bought a TV that was a Black Friday deal.
As someone who actually works selling TV's inside best buy I can tell you Insignia which is best buys brand is manufactured by LG and Vizios are made by Sony. I will also let you guys know the reason those black friday tvs are so cheap is not that there is necessarily anything defective with them but rather that they skimp on one or more features. For example the Samsung 4k tv they had going for about $800 is only a 60hz refresh rate screen which is god awful for anything with any degree of motion.
Good to know who makes Insignia and Vizio (and reinforces my hunch that Vizio is my best bang for the buck when I buy a TV for my new place in a month or two). But I think you'll find that here again not everybody is as particular about some of these technical things as you are; they literally just cannot "see" the difference. I am typing this on a 60hz monitor that I use for all my gaming, had a 60hz TV purchased in early 2013 that my and my roommates were always quite pleased with, etc. Looking at the selection of TV's on BestBuy.com right now, it looks like 60hz TV's make up about half of the entire selection, and I hardly think everybody who buys them is just using them to look at still photos from their last vacation. You spend your entire day working with TV's and you doubtlessly become more aware of all of the subtle differences in picture quality. For the average person this is not the case.
This.
The specs don't tell the whole story. The brand isn't everything, but it's an indicator that someone with a reputation to lose made the set. Reviews are vitally important, and they're hard to come by on the kind of holiday-specific SKUs that tend to show up for the annual run on cheap inches.
The way TV prices have fallen, you're not spending much extra to step up from the low-end to something respectable for gaming. I've seen the difference it makes when refresh rate is high and input lag is low.
The TV I mentioned above is an Emerson, a "cheap" brand. However when I opened it up, the parts have philips-magnavox on them. Make of that what you will. I assume Emerson is a cheaper parted off shoot.
Only a mere 136 pins to go!
Now a SORNY offers real quality at a discount price.
No, it "overscans" and the effect is basically that it "zooms in" on the center of the picture, so you lose stuff at every edge.
that's why we call it the struggle, you're supposed to sweat
Not sure where this rumor started but Sony has nothing to do with Vizio. I have a lot of customers that think that too. They even had a patent suit not long ago. Agree with everything else though.
Pfft, nothing beats "The Carnivale..."
-Tycho Brahe
Worked great until the day it tried to beat up your stereo.
My monitor currently is a small 1080p TV. I bought it ~4 years ago. I am going to replace it sometime later next year when 1) 4k Adaptive Sync monitors start coming out, and 2) Skylake CPUs and hopefully a new generation of GPUs come out, at which point I will build a box capable of driving a 4k monitor.
Which makes me wonder if someday there will be game consoles and TVs that support adaptive sync as well.
Fast forward 2 years, my in-laws just picked up a massive 65" Visio on Friday for 2/3 the price of my Panasonic. So we sat down to watch Captain America and the quality difference was stunning. The most egregious problem was bright white bars running up each side of the TV from the LED backlighting, but dark scenes in general looked like crap because the best the TV could manage was a sort of dark grey.
You can't give someone a pirate ship in one game, and then take it back in the next game. It's rude.
Ahhh, the good ol' Grundig Decepticon. Named Megatron to latch on to the popularity of Sony's Trinitron sets.
Every time you turn it on, it says, "I am Megatron!"
-Tycho Brahe