Can't Find A Good TV Anymore

[Flopper]

Well, I just bought two TVs, I bought the larger one I spoke of needing for my home theater moving up from a 60" to a 65" since they don't make 60s anymore, and realized that with them coming here to take away my old TV, this would be a good time to get rid of my old 1986(?) Hitachi CRT as well, friend that it is. 27” CRTs are heavy as hell, the thing was a brute to carry up the steps many years ago as it was and there is no way I’d try to lift and carry it down the steps now, not to mention you can't just throw a TV away anymore, I'd have to load it in my trunk and drive it 30 minutes out south of me far away, sit in a long line to get rid of it now, plus the picture has been getting dim for years anyway, the lion’s share of electrons having boiled off the cathode of the tube years ago—— it is still watchable but obviously not the bright picture it once was, so I relented to part with it and get a new LED TV in its place that will also have a digital tuner built in now so will no longer need my outboard D/A tuner I’ve been using which converts to analog RF modulated to input to the old set! I'm replacing it with a 40" wide screen HD TV.

So that’s about it! I get both sets in about a week, delivered and installed, old TVs hauled away, and I’ll have more to say then as I did a major research on the whole field of TVs and could have bought anything, but as I will explain, actually eschewed getting the latest and greatest features and technology finding that I was actually paying for a lot of crap I didn’t want or need and the newest technology is actually not as ideal for my needs as slightly older but better proven technology, and I found a brand that has less techno-crap on it and is more basic but actually better designed and a better fit to my needs more centered on just good ol' TV watching and even has a better assortment of inputs and things much more costly TVs often fail to have!

Anyone considering a TV in their future will want to hear what I found out as reading through 30 or more websites on the matter and ratings and comparos of brands and features, none of them give very good real world info instead putting the sets on a test bench and measuring them with lab test equipment which doesn’t actually mean as much as just sitting down and USING the set!

I would have bought the sets sooner but I’ve had a lot of other things here to deal with and finally got back yesterday to crawling behind the TV gear and disconnecting a whole bunch of cords and wires and things so that now, all that is left to do before they take my current TV is to pull the plug and three HDMI cables.

What I would like in a TV is the ability to easy fill my screen with the picture regardless of picture format. Streaming services like Netflix and Prime force the viewer to watch the program in the format it was created. So on my big screen I may get letterbox, or even worst if I happen to be watching a movie from the 50's or 60's when movie studios were playing around with various widescreen formats. For unknown reason, when I watch cable I can spread the picture out to fill the screen regardless of the channel. My eyes are not what they use to be so the bigger the picture the better and I am not too concerned with the distortion caused from changing the size.

 

[toobfreak]

What I would like in a TV is the ability to easy fill my screen with the picture regardless of picture format. Streaming services like Netflix and Prime force the viewer to watch the program in the format it was created. So on my big screen I may get letterbox, or even worst if I happen to be watching a movie from the 50's or 60's when movie studios were playing around with various widescreen formats. For unknown reason, when I watch cable I can spread the picture out to fill the screen regardless of the channel. My eyes are not what they use to be so the bigger the picture the better and I am not too concerned with the distortion caused from changing the size.

Most TVs allow you to change the formatting right at the TV set regardless of upstream components.

 

[toobfreak]

Well, my network switch is here! My sound-bar and sub arrived just a bit ago! TVs arrive tomorrow!

 

[toobfreak]

Got both TVs up and running! 40" bedroom TV by Insignia is just great, and the 65" 4K UHD TCL TV with QLED Mini-LED technology is the bomb. I have the matching soundbar and wireless sub working on the big 65" TV as well as have the Blu Ray player and my movie archive hooked up. I will probably start a new thread on what I've learned but let me just say don't fall for the hype on the very latest technology and throw away thousands of extra dollars, I've got unbeatable picture quality and amazing cinema quality surround sound with thunderous bass and as a true audiophile who has worked on his own circuit topologies, let me just say that for a fair song, I got ball-busting, face-peeling amazing picture quality I would put up against any other 4K UHD TV and fairly awesome cinema-quality sound to match. Plus the 40" TV. All for LESS than $1270.00.

Just one glitch I'm still working out: My Blu Ray player is having some sudden issue that when I hook it up, I get the picture but not the sound. Must be another stupid HDMI syc problem. Will get back to that tomorrow.

 

[ralfy]

Startup Telly Plans to Give Away 500,000 Free 4K TVs This Year. The Catch? The Sets Have a Second Screen That Constantly Shows You Ads

Ilya Pozin made a bunch of money when Viacom bought Pluto TV, the free video-streaming company he co-founded, for $340 million four years ago. Since exiting Pluto about a year after that deal close…

variety.com

 

[Bob Blaylock]

Years ago, it would have been unthinkable and business suicide not to make your product reparable. Most of the time, good companies went to great lengths and added cost making their products easily serviceable, so in that sense, that old stuff while big, heavy and power hungry might have actually been greener than printed circuits that all just get scraped into a landfill. And the old stuff was much more all metal which breaks down instead of all plastic that remains forever.


That's an old friend, a classic tubed Tektronix dual input scope, probably 20 meg bandwidth. I use a somewhat newer Hewlett-Packard solid state dual input analog storage scope.

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I have a lot of vintage electronics as I build and service a lot of my own stereo equipment and have a room full of vintage tube and a little solid state audio equipment as well as shelves and shelves full of vintage test equipment including an inductive DC current probe capable of detecting nano-amperes of leakage. And I am just a piker compared to an old friend I once had before he passed away. In fact, my moniker is in honor of him.

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In the picture is even a counter using a nixie tube display, my favorite and the best display ever of all time. But one of my real jewels is this Philips transistorized VOM. It is the only VOM to ever utilize a linear display with consistent accuracy and resolution end to end full scale instead of the typical log scale which lost accuracy and resolution at either end of its scale. I bought the meter off of Fluke in 1995 as the Philips importer and back then, it sold new for $550 I think, astronomical for a VOM compared to a Simpson or the like which was a fraction of the price, but there is nothing else like it.

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And unlike other VOMs with low Z like 20K, this meter was a 10 meg input.

I got a new toy, a few days ago.

The last time I had any awareness of what an oscilloscope should cost, I was thinking at the very least, hundreds of dollars for an absolute bottom-of-the-line example; and no less than a thousand or two for one that is really any good.

I was startled to see an ad come up on some social media site for an oscilloscope costing about thirty dollars, so I jumped on it. A little further research, after this order had already been placed, showed that it wasn't really as unbelievable a deal as it seemed to me. Not a bad deal, but not really spectacular either. Looks like this is right about representative of the current absolute bottom of the line for modern oscilloscopes, both in price and in capability.

Of the three oscilloscopes that I now own, this is the only one that was readily adaptable to run on a battery, which I have now done, making it capable of completely portable operation, even if there's no where to plug it in.

It came with the sort of common transformer-on-plug power supply that many modern devices use, putting out 9VDC. I was easily able to obtain a cable with the right connector on one end to plug into this oscilloscope, and a standard 9V battery connector which I put on the other end of that cable, so that I can use a standard 9V battery to power it instead of the transformer-on-plug supply.

Between this and the old 502A that I have previously shown in this thread, I also have a Tektronix T202, which is a very early example of a non-CRT-based oscilloscope. I've occasionally toyed with the idea of making a battery-based power supply for it, but never made a serious attempt. It would have been considerably more complex to do so than with my newest oscilloscope, because it has a multiple-ping power connector, with at least two or three different voltages on it. And it uses an odd power connector that I have little confidence that I could find.

The picture here shows my new oscilloscope, in front of my ancient function generator, showing a sine wave therefrom, with a standard 12-ounce can of Coke next to the Oscilloscope to give a sense of size. The display actually looks better than this picture shows. I just used my cell phone to take this picture; I can probably get a better picture, that does better justice to it, if I get out my real camera.

 

[Bob Blaylock]

And here are a couple of pictures taken with my real camera,

 

[toobfreak]

The picture here shows my new oscilloscope, in front of my ancient function generator

That's an oscilloscope? The wonders of microcircuitry these days! I like your wave generator, I should have one like that but I don't. I have two scopes, my big HP analog storage scope and the closest thing I have to your gizmo above is this battery operated portable Fluke (left), which combines the functions of a scope, a multimeter, a component tester, and a data logger, here connected to my laptop collecting a waveform.

BTW, I have my new TV and have been evaluating it for weeks. Soon as I'm finished, I will paste some of the reports I've been making on the technology for my own forum here as well for anyone interested or considering a new TV of their own to read.

 

[toobfreak]

And here are a couple of pictures taken with my real camera,

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Impressive for such a little thing. My guess is that the biggest issue now will be the longevity and durability of the little thing. Still, I note your General Radio wave generator is still working real nice putting out a perfect duty cycle of 50.0% with little noise or overshoot!

 

[Bob Blaylock]

Impressive for such a little thing. My guess is that the biggest issue now will be the longevity and durability of the little thing. Still, I note your General Radio wave generator is still working real nice putting out a perfect duty cycle of 50.0% with little noise or overshoot!

Actually, in the second post, with the pictures taken by my real camera, I was using this oscilloscope's built-in test signa. There's alittle metal tab on top of teh oscilloscope, that puts out a 1KHz square/rectangle wave. The frequency is fixed, the amplitude seems to be inconsistent, but usually from about 0V at the bottom to about 3½V at the top. The duty cycle, I've figured out, is adjustable.

The documentation is rather scanty with this and mostly seems to be about assembling it from a kit. Mine came fully-assembled, but apparently it is also sold in kit form, and it came with some badly-translated documents about how to assemble it. Not much about how to actually operate it.

 

[toobfreak]

Actually, in the second post, with the pictures taken by my real camera, I was using this oscilloscope's built-in test signa. There's alittle metal tab on top of teh oscilloscope, that puts out a 1KHz square/rectangle wave.

That explains the little alligator clip lead.

The frequency is fixed, the amplitude seems to be inconsistent

No doubt just a built in bistable multivariable flip-flop.

The duty cycle, I've figured out, is adjustable.

Probably just a resistive pot to insert control over the chip's time constant.

The documentation is rather scanty with this and mostly seems to be about assembling it from a kit. Mine came fully-assembled, but apparently it is also sold in kit form, and it came with some badly-translated documents about how to assemble it. Not much about how to actually operate it.

I figured it was Chinese, and I noticed there was no brand name on the front cover, so yeah, but a pretty cool kit nevertheless. Definitely worth $30 to me.

 

[Bob Blaylock]

The duty cycle, I've figured out, is adjustable.

Probably just a resistive pot to insert control over the chip's time constant.

Not a mechanically-adjusted pot. It's adjusted by pushing the buttons on the front of the 'scope in a certain order.

 

[Bob Blaylock]

A photography-related forum on which I participate has weekly and monthly themed challenges. One week, years ago, the theme for the weekly was “Bridges”. This was my entry. I'm not sure many of the other participants understood it.

 

[Dagosa]

Welp, my 2009 Mitsubishi 60” DLP TV was a goner again last night. I sat down to watch TV and eat something, relax, and BING! No picture, no sound, just a red status light. After about 30 minutes of fiddling, I was sure the TV was really DOA this time. At the very least salvageable only by a factory technician. But after a time of rest and reflection laying on my bed thinking about it watching my 1986 Hitachi 27” CRT bedroom TV which still works like a champ never a problem (they really make the BEST TVs), I got behind the thing, delved into it and resurrected it for now at least to live another day.

But my patience is broken. I’ve had it with DLP. I want a new TV with better technology and I would buy one today and pay any price, if but for a few things:

• 60” TVs are apparently no longer made. Selection is now down to either 55” or 65” and my speaker system is set up optimized for a 60” so I would have to reconfigure my speakers to fit a 65”.
• It must be stand mounted. I cannot do wall mount (not that I would want to) because my rear wall slants.
• My TV had a boatload of inputs for HDMI, component, composite, S-Video, RF in, outputs, you name it. And I use them all.
• I’m a name brand buyer: Hitachi, Sony, Panasonic, Pioneer, Mitsubishi, but most TVs now are fuzzy brands I never even heard of. What’s an “Insignia?” "Hisense?" And please don’t even mention Samsung to me. Every Samsung product I've dealt with is crap.

Much to my dismay, all I found was marketing hype. Mind you, I was an electronics/electrical engineer who has a lot of background in video (I could probably design and make my own TV) and all I found was a couple of useful features (like 120Hz refresh rate which was just coming out new when I bought my TV). Instead, they hit you with

• 4XHD resolution (why do I need this when all my sources are 720 to 1080 at best?).
• LED technology, processing technology, backlighting technology (they are all nice, all good, not a critical choice). I guess plasma TV is long gone.
• Built in streaming services, Google, Roku, Apple, etc. I don’t use any of that crap and don’t even want Ethernet connected to my TV. Even the damn remote controls have buttons for all this stuff I do not want or need.
• The damn TVs now have 99 specs, 95 of which are of little to no value to the user. They have USB ports, optical output ports, BUT NO FREAKING INPUTS.

The ONE THING that matters, to a TV buyer you would think, is the capability to have the input range and scale needed to support your existing equipment, but that spec is buried in the specs and when you find it, the inputs are:

3 or 4 HDMI inputs! And at least one or two called HDMI 2.1 which probably means incompatible with regular HDMI. Probably an RF modulated input (antenna in), and if you are lucky, maybe ONE composite input. And that is it. Many of my devices were made before HDMI was even invented. Worse, I hate HDMI. But we are forced to use it because unlike DVI, HDMI allows the industry to spy on you and collect data on your viewing habits and things. And as I went up in price, $1000, $2000, $3000 and more, instead of getting more inputs, all it got me was more gingerbread technology fluff garbage features I do not need.

This really bothers me as I know how companies and engineers think: Designed Obsolescence. Instead of adding inputs to support older technology and gear, they want you to throw everything out TO BUY NEW. Gotta keep that return business! Hell, not only do I still have two professional Super-VHS tape decks that cost $800 each in 1988, but I even still have a Sony Laserdisc player! It is cool to fire it up once in a while. Back then, they used to make laserdiscs which had the full TAR (Theatrical aspect ratio / letter-boxing) which showed the FULL width of widescreen films even if the aspect ratio was 5:1.

Now when you buy a BluRay or DVD in widescreen, they still chop some of the ends off like pan and scan to fit the standard 16:9 HD widescreen format of today which isn’t very widescreen. I remember going to see Its a Mad Mad Mad Mad World at the theater in 1963 that the screen was so wide, it was curved, and you had to look side to side to take it all in, you could not follow all the action at once. Oh what an experience going to see a movie used to be at one time. So now I am forced to consider just keeping my old TV and sinking money into it to keep it going, or looking for some sort of “converter box” that takes all these old interface formats like composite video, S-video, component video, DVI, etc., which then CONVERTS them into an HDMI output and hope the thing works half well.

Anyone ever try one of those?

Most of the good brands are gone. You can find Sony, Vizio, LG, Samsung (ugh), but not Hitachi, Pioneer Elite, Panasonic Prism, or Mitsubishi, and some others that used to be the best there was. Nearly all of it is Chinese or Korean made now.

Nope…it was a Mitsubishi. Go to owner driven reviews like CU and buy by their rec9mendations.