Found a 65" Toshiba HDTV today for cheap... will be great for 360 and hd-dvds, as well as satellite hd channels...

Just ordered a Toshiba HD-DVD player on ebay..... They're suppose to have a lousy remote and have appx 45 second load times, but it should be nice anyway. I already have a 360 and hd-dvd drive, but it doesn't have HDMI, and you can't upconvert without it. So, it should be a neat addition to my home theater stuff.

I always get confused with HD. There are so many options, plasma, flat screen, projection, liquid something. 480, 1080....I wish I knew what any of that meant!

Here is some more info about HD.........

480i is what regular standard def televisions are. Some people consider 480p as HD as well, but its official title is ED, or enhanced definition. ED tvs usually have a widescreen but won't display 720p, 1080i, or 1080p resolutions, even though some will actually accept those connections and downconvert them to 480p.

CRT HDTVs are probably the best picture quality, but most stores are slowly doing away with CRT televisions. They are very very heavy, and there has been some rumors that the EPA may have something to do with some stores not carrying them any more, maybe a ban soon.

Then, you have LCD flat panel, Plastma Flat Panel, LCD Rear-Projection, and DLP rear-projection. Rear projection tvs usually offer a good contrast ratio and generally a better picture quality than LCD and plasma. That doesn't mean a $4000 lcd or plasma tv won't look better than a $900 rear-projection.

Flat Panel HDTVs generally offer an OK or good picture quality with HD broadcasts but sometimes terrible quality on standard def channels.

Also, with flat panel televisions, although your bargain basement lcd and plasma televisions are 720p, you actually pay more for contrast ratio. You may see a $600-$1000 flat panel for 300:1 or 500:1 contrast ratio. The best way to describe what contrast ratio does is give more colors/variants of colors between black and white. You may have heard or read people saying that if you look at how a television displays black colors and dark pictures, that kind of tells you what kind of video quality the tv has.

Recently, a new technology built in to the newest revision of HDMI (hdmi 1.3) called deep color will allow the quality to be improved even more, but it's probably a very expensive technology that not many televisions have adopted as of yet. Some HD-DVD players and Blu-Ray players will support it.

The best thing about LCD tvs is the ability to mount them on a wall. So, they are space savers, but you pay more for screen size compared to rear-projections.

It's kind of important that you have at least one HDMI slot, if you want to upscale your old dvds as well. Many dvd players will offer upscaling, and most HD-DVD players should offer it as well, and by law, they can't upscale dvds on analog component connections.

Fortunately, not all of your old dvds will suffer from upgrading to HD. Ones that are pressed as anamorphic widescreen actually have a higher vertical resolution than normal fullscreen and letterboxed dvds. What does this mean to you? They're both compatible with standard def and high def, but only EDTVs and HDTVs take advantage of the higher vertical resolution.

Between anamorphic widescreen dvds and upscaling, you'll get a better picture quality, but the quality won't quite be as good as using a true HD source video. In some older, grainy films, it may look worse than standard def, but in a decent video, it'll look better.

Not all HDTV content will be so amazing that it'll just be so obvious or jump out of the screen at you, but some will. The best way to enjoy HD content is to get the biggest screen you can afford, but do make sure to look at picture quality and compare with several other tvs before buying. Some tvs just look bad no matter what, while others may look brilliant.

720P, 1080I, or 1080p? In the ideal world, a huge 1080p lcd rear-projection tv with hdmi 1.3 w/deep color would be something awesome, to have something that was a bit futureproof, but have hi-def standards settled over the years? HDMI 1.3 just came out. DTS-HD, DTS-Master, Dolby Plus, Lossless audio have just starting coming out on a consumer level. People bought HDTVs a few years ago that were 1080i or didn't have HDMI connectors. Most people buy a tv to last 10-15 years. Those old televisions, in many ways, are already obsolete.

While 1080p isn't something you just have to have, HDMI is probably something you'd really want, like I said, for upscaling, but for a secure connection when cable and satellite providers start turning on digital rights management.

Satellite and Broadcast HDTV is probably 70-80% 720p, the rest 1080i. In the USA, there are pretty much no 1080p broadcasts. 1080p is used for video games (PS3, XBOX 360,) hd-dvds, blu-ray, and some upscaling dvds.

DLP vs LCD rear projection... One thing I really like about CRT tvs is that they use three color (red, green, and blue) tubes and it is sort of like RGB or video layering. RGB or video layering has been used in very low resolution arcade monitors for many years, and still has been accepted as one of the best video qualities.

We've been using CRT televisions for many many years, but the colors haven't been seperated in the inputs. First, there were rf connections, where you have a mix of audio and video, as well as fm noise and other interference. Next, you had composite connections, which seperates the video from audio and is better shielded against interference, but requires a filter on the television to seperate all of the colors from one line. Composite video is what has been used for analog television stations, except they use a slightly better BNC connection.

Then, we had S-Video, which separates chromance and lumance, and it's a lot better quality than composite but not quite as good as RGB. In Europe, however, the standard has been RGB for many years. Why didn't we in America ever have RGB as a standard? Not until HDTVs have we had a true color seperation and layering, from component inputs, and later dvi and hdmi. I suppose some cases, vga as well.

The point is this. LCD still uses some color seperation, while DLP actually only has one color tube. I believe DLP just uses fancy digital processing, which IMO, is sort of gimmicky. Think about this. You're buying a new digital camera. You have the choice between a 50x digital zoom camera for $399, or a 10x optical zoom camera for the same price. Which one will give a better picture? The true, optical zoom, each and every time. I've found out the hard way and so has many other people. So, do you want digital processors controlling the quality of your video, or do you want true color layering?

I also work with many analog and digital music processors etc, for home studio recording, and just like digital zoom, digital effects and processing never sound as good as analog.

Not every case of analog vs digital is so clear cut, but those are arguments for other products and services...

Wow, thanks so much, I will probably print this out to save for when I buy a HD tv(probably far in the future when we all ride space jets to work)
It is just so confusing to me, but it seems to me that videogames are ahead tvs almost as they are compatible with things that tv shows arent even in yet.

What makes video games better for both SD and HD gaming is a technology that will take a core graphics model and convert it at will (limited by graphics and processing power) and make it look just as good on a standard def tv or hi-def tv. With Video Games and PC games, they can do that, but with live action movies, they can't. So, that's kind of why video games take more advantage of hi-def technologies as opposed to cable or satellite.

Before, on PC games, you may have actually had 2 or 3 different models, with differing resolutions, or just one with more bluring, enhancing, smoothing, anti-aliasing, and filtering effects. Anti-Aliasing takes square polygons and tries to smooth them, into a more 3-d effect, if I remember correctly. Blurring takes images that look computery/square/polygonal and blurs them a little, to make them look less like that. So, a lot of the effects do about the same thing, but most of what these effects do is take away some of the quality.. Think of the word "Blur"... we're taking a clearer image and blurring it.

If you play a computer game that's 10 years old, it'll never look as good as a new one, no matter how high the settings or expensive the video card. Maybe with some of the newer modeling technologies, they can make games that will have an unlimited lifespan. You upgrade your video card and/or drivers, and it looks better than before and just as good as anything new. That would be the ideal technology...

Found 28 strategy guides today for $3 for all of them...

Found Legendary Axe for turbo grafx 16 at the salvation army today for $2..

Found Bonk's Adventure for the TG16 today for $2... 2 tg16 games in 2 days for 2 dollars apiece... heh

Got a DOS PC game from the thrift store to add to my collection: Armour-Geddon.

PS2- ar tonelico! finally, very hard to find

360- raw vs smackdown 2007

Got a PC game called Sin Episodes Emergence: episode 1, still sealed for $4. Unfortunately, it is like hl2 and you have to create a steam account and activate the product on the internet to be able to play it. So, I'm just going to keep it sealed and put it in the collection. Otherwise, if I were to ever sell it or whatever, no one would be able to play it anyway....

Got a Disney HD-DVD called: Un Ponte per TerabithiA in the mail today, the Italian release of Bridge to Terabithia. Still sticking it to Sony and their blu-ray players as much as possible.

If it weren't for imports, I probably would have went with both formats, regretfully, but Toshiba and NEC really wanted to put emphasis on getting imports to work on any player in the world. They probably didnt' even realize the significance behind it at the time, because of the blu-ray exclusives, but rather probably thought that people would buy "international" films...

Just pre-ordered Transformers 2-disc HD-DVD Special Edition set from amazon. Yes, this one is being released in the USA, and the cheapest price I've found so far is on amazon. It's supposed to be released on Oct 16th, 2007.

Hopefully, they won't screw up my pre-order like they've done before..... I hate it when you pre-order something a month or more in advance, and when it's being released, they say something about being sold out or delayed lol.... We'll see...

Of course, if I really wanted the product as fast as possible, I would have just bought it in the store for a few bucks more.... but i've already seen the movie...