I need a very specific type of a TV

Viper87227 said:
I think you are failing to consider an important element here, which is that TV's have come a long way in the past several years. Even if we operate under your logic that upscaled 1080p will never look as good as native 1080p, there are other features in modern TV's besides resolution that contribute towards their superior image quality. Full-Array Local Dimming, for example, can make an astounding difference in how good an LED TV looks.
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Actually, I think you don't realize how good some of the older videophile-tier TVs were. The Sharp Elites were FALD -- and had far more zones than any modern LCD except for the Samsung Q9FN and Sony Z9D. The 60 inch Sharp Elite had something like 240-300 zones and the 70 inch had 600+. There is a reason it cost $8000 at the time. The modern Sony Z9D(best LCD TV that exists) has 648 and the Samsung Q9FN has 480. There are some avsforum posts comparing the older Sharp Elites to newer TVs, and while the newer Sony FALDs(and surely the Q9FN) do perform better, if you find a Sharp Elite for $500-600 and the panel is in good condition, it's going to perform significantly better than any of the cheap TCL/Vizio/etc garbage that you are going to find new at this price point. Now, the reliability of a 5/6/7 year old LCD TV is another story but the performance is above average even by modern standards.

Same goes for the plasma -- The F8500 is going to beat everything but the top tier modern Sony/Samsung FALDs and OLED on black levels and image quality. And for motion quality, well LCD and OLED still struggle to compete with plasma in that particular area due to sample and hold.

Now this is all for SDR 1080p content -- of course the big benefit of modern TVs is 4K and HDR. But if you aren't gonna watch that content, it doesn't really matter. And I'm not degrading the modern TVs, HDR is a huge, game changing effect as far as I'm concerned. It looks SO much better than SDR that I consider it equivalent to the improvement from SD to HD, and much better than HD to 4K.
 
Sancus said:
Actually, I think you don't realize how good some of the older videophile-tier TVs were. The Sharp Elites were FALD -- and had far more zones than any modern LCD except for the Samsung Q9FN and Sony Z9D. The 60 inch Sharp Elite had something like 240-300 zones and the 70 inch had 600+. There is a reason it cost $8000 at the time. The modern Sony Z9D(best LCD TV that exists) has 648 and the Samsung Q9FN has 480. There are some avsforum posts comparing the older Sharp Elites to newer TVs, and while the newer Sony FALDs(and surely the Q9FN) do perform better, if you find a Sharp Elite for $500-600 and the panel is in good condition, it's going to perform significantly better than any of the cheap TCL/Vizio/etc garbage that you are going to find new at this price point. Now, the reliability of a 5/6/7 year old LCD TV is another story but the performance is above average even by modern standards.

Same goes for the plasma -- The F8500 is going to beat everything but the top tier modern Sony/Samsung FALDs and OLED on black levels and image quality. And for motion quality, well LCD and OLED still struggle to compete with plasma in that particular area due to sample and hold.

Now this is all for SDR 1080p content -- of course the big benefit of modern TVs is 4K and HDR. But if you aren't gonna watch that content, it doesn't really matter. And I'm not degrading the modern TVs, HDR is a huge, game changing effect as far as I'm concerned. It looks SO much better than SDR that I consider it equivalent to the improvement from SD to HD, and much better than HD to 4K.
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He already ruled out plasma, so I wasn't factoring that into my opinion. I'm well aware of how nice some of the high-end plasmas can look.

In general you are correct that some of the high end TVs of yesterday can still hold their own, but when you're talking about 5+ year old videophile grade TVs, what's the likelihood of coming across one for sale? I can't imagine many were sold, which would make coming across a used one an extreme long shot. I guess my point was this guy is creating a big headache for himself by narrowing down his choices to a very specific TV that will be extremely difficult to track down when there are some really good modern day options that, even with upscaling, should provide a better viewing experience than the sort of 1080p TVs he's likely to come across.
 
Ya they're not available that often but I did link one for $650 yesterday! Looks like it's already sold, not surprising, looked like a v. good deal.

And yes, I do agree the OP has put himself in a difficult position, but I don't have any interest in trying to convince people to change what they want. If he wants a good 1080P TV specifically he's welcome to hunt for them, and I don't think there is really any value in spending pages trying to convince him that he really wants something else. I don't go in the Sony FW900 thread and try to convince people that their ridiculous heat dumping 100lb monitor is outdated and they should really buy an Acer X27 either :p
 
Sancus said:
Ya they're not available that often but I did link one for $650 yesterday! Looks like it's already sold, not surprising, looked like a v. good deal.

And yes, I do agree the OP has put himself in a difficult position, but I don't have any interest in trying to convince people to change what they want. If he wants a good 1080P TV specifically he's welcome to hunt for them, and I don't think there is really any value in spending pages trying to convince him that he really wants something else. I don't go in the Sony FW900 thread and try to convince people that their ridiculous heat dumping 100lb monitor is outdated and they should really buy an Acer X27 either :p
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I agree, to an extent. He's adamant about what he wants, and that's fine. The only reason I said anything was his comment of why pay for a 4K TV when he's never going to play 4K video on it. I wanted to point out that there were other advantages to modern TVs than the 4K resolution, which he may not have considered.
 
You say other advantages, but the only one you mentioned was FALD, which as Sancus already mentioned the Elite also has... I'm actually in fact a bit unsure about FALD, I've read and seen pics of the light halos it can form, but I guess a perfect TV will never exist. And having to wait for a while till I find one for sale is not the biggest problem, I already have an old 1080p IPS TV with no smart features from like 2009 or so that I'm happily using, it's just not a high end model, and since I've already swapped all of the components in my old PCs with only ultimate flagship parts from back in the day, and trying to do the same with the HTPC at the moment, I'd like to do the same with the TV
 
GodOfGaming said:
I've read and seen pics of the light halos it can form, but I guess a perfect TV will never exist.
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Haloing is a downside of FALD relative to plasma and OLED yeah, but not relative to LCDs without FALD. All haloing means is that around bright elements, you'll have elevated black levels... but it's important to understand that without FALD the ENTIRE SCREEN would have elevated black levels. Instead of having greyish blacks on your entire screen(which is how every normal LCD looks) the greyish region is restricted to small areas around bright objects.

Someone posted a really good example of this with the Acer X27 since you can turn the FALD on and off on it. As you can see, FALD is always better than no FALD.
 
btw thanks for mentioning that the 70 inch Elite has a lot more FALD zones than the 60 inch, I would have thought the 60 inch model would be the one to go for otherwise
 
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