While looking at "The Perfect Vision's" website for info on the upcoming 950 review, I took a look at This Article on the new Toshiba LcoS RPTV. Wow, full HD resolution without the need for 9" tubes. I have been looking for more companies to put product out on the market utilizing this technology. The only thing I don't like about this unit is the price! I wonder if the Outlaws can have a similar set out this coming summer for maybe.... $3,000?

I wonder if the Outlaws can have a similar set out this coming summer for maybe.... $3,000?
If they do tell them to call me first and I can return my current set in the 30-day and give their unit a shot.

The Toshiba does not accept a 1080P input, which disapoints many who are waiting for displays to get to (true) 1080P capibilty(and if I understand part of the ins & out, no one broadcasts in 1080P). The set scales 720P to 1080P. And I assume is de-interlacing 1080i souces to 720P.(in turn scaled to 1080P) In otherwords no native 1080P is possible, I saw some guys talking about work-arounds with off-board gear to force feed this set a native 1080P but I believe they decided it is not possible. The guys that watch it said Toshiba's weak spot in the past had been the quality of their onboard Deinterlacer/scalera in past models.

Those that have seen them at the big AV shows had commented on 'sparkle' on the screen (up close) something most likely to do with a interaction with the reticular screen and ? (another thing) wondering wheter Toshiba would address this issue in the retail units.

So DLP, rainbow
LCD, black level
Plasma, burn in, black level
LyCOS, sparkel, price.

Pick your modern posion.

I forgot to add the big grin at the end of the $3,000 line! Price, I wish... 1080I is the standard for true HiDef; IMO, 1080P is still a dream! What got my attention was the fact this LcoS unit will do true 1080I (according to the author). As of now you can't get that (1920x1080) with LCD or DLP in a RPTV or FP. Or most RP CRT's. Sparkles, huh? Always a fly in the ointment! I'd probably hang onto that Sony if I were you. I've seen 'em and I like them.

Always a fly in the ointment!

Still sometimes the ointment is the best brand available. Can't wait really to see one of these units myself, but last I looked early purchasers who had pre-bought and been promised dates we have already past, have still not received theirs.
I don't know how long before they are commonly on showfloors to run into.

Where did you hear of that Lena?

That makes no sense at all to me. The set is capable of displaying 1080P and it actually upconverts all signals to that resolution. Why would it downconvert 1080i to 720p then back to 1080P? That would defeat the purpose of having the 1080 chips.

She stated that she was assuming the downconvert and then upconvert owing to the set's internal 720P to 1080P converter. She didn't say it was so.

I still can't figure out why, when they hashed out all these digital resolutions, they made them 1.5x multiples of each other instead of 2x or some other nice number, to make scaling easier.

I'm also confused about the lack of 1080p devices out there. It seems to me that once you invest in the hardware for a panel that has 1920x1080 resolution, 1080p should be no harder to handle than 1080i, with perhaps the exception of really old CRT units that were limited in their refresh frequency.

------------------
Matthew J. Hill
matt@idsi.net

Short answer - It's a matter of cost. 1080i is only 31KHz sweep and the old tech (CRTs) can easily do that for a few more cents. When the final plan was drafted 5 years ago the general feeling was we manufacturers can do this bandwidth for only this much more money (10 - 20% more) and get 4X --> 5X more income (it's NEW) for a while to pay for other cost and have a sizable revenue stream until everyone else will catch up. (Maybe there will be some competition.) It was also part of the compromise with the computer guys to have square pixels and what bandwidth was required to accomplich that based on 2X --> 4X the resolution on bigger screens, i.e., what resolution is required for for X distance from the screen with the field of view subtending angle A - and have a wider format, more "movie" like - and still do it relatively cheap with known technology.


[This message has been edited by JDB001 (edited December 23, 2002).]

I’m still trying to ‘stick’ all signal resolution straight in my head possible in displays and their sources and sometimes the combinations are pretty varied how each does it. Some of the conversions theoretically listed that this set would perform were also part of the chain out of the box. If the signal is 720p fed, the STB passes everything in 1080i only, then the set takes that 1080i and deinterlaces to 720p which it proceeds to convert to 1080p.
I could be wrong and am only going by some posters who are hotly following this units release. See Mark Haflich’s post below, I believe he’s pretty well respected at AVS. But I don’t guarantee anything I hear or read when I type ‘assume’ ‘read’ ‘think I heard’, just passing little things I run into unconfirmed. The set if not delayed again will be in homes this week, we’ll start hearing from real world users who pre-purchased before it was released. Sorry out to lunch so to speak for Christmas (hope everyone’s was wonderful and safe!) and will be off and on to get business back on line. Just saw your comment.
Check out this very long thread at AVS forum. Although they do go off topic into arguments (never seen that before in a forum, -have you? ) and you have to dig for the scaling/deinterlacing portions. The conclusion being, (Last I looked) you cannot off-board work around this issue). There is talk how much of an issue is it, and a lot will depend on the sets internals quality for these conversions. And as always with the higher resolutions will be severely affected by the sources original filmed format and signal source quality.

The Toshiba near as I can tell will not accept 1080P on any input. DVI or RGB etc. It will de-interlace 1080i internally, but you cannot bypass that scalar and pass a true 1080p source signal through it.
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?s=8021660526ce6705e9692454d63fa9db&threadid=168263
Some excerpts:

OPEN QUOTES
MrGonk (great name huh?!?!)
Quality Fetishish
i'm a videophile and i prefer 1080i. yes, progressive scan is better, 60fps is better, and you can't see the resolution difference on a direct-view crt and can barely notice it on a projection crt. BUT... it's only a matter of time before you can deinterlace 1080i without a problem, and only a matter of time until the all-digital displays can reproduce a full 1920x1080. we're on the very cusp of that time. i'm willing to bet that in five years, one will be able to buy a high-end lcos, dlp, or plasma device that will display 1920x1080p natively, and will upconvert with the same precision that the sage/faroudja/dcdi hardware upconverts 480i to 480p. then what you'll have is pixel-perfect 1080p @60fps... and yes perhaps 720p survives bandwidth limitations a bit better, and compresses a bit better, but compression will only get more efficient, and eventually a high-bitrate (and/or low-loss low-bitrate compression) home format will allow for a negligible difference in the efficiency with which 1080i, 1080p, and 720p video is encoded.... and when that time comes, what advantages will the 720p format be left with?

Rogo/Mark
The set will not allow 1080p input. It apparently will scale and double to 1920 x 1080, but it will not accept a 1080p input from a Dune or Vigatec or whoever has that output on their video processor. I would be stunned beyond human comprehension if there was some way around this. It is difficult enough to get sets to display their native mode through DVI when there are a lot fewer pixels at stake.
I would expect though that 1080i doubled to 1080p should look really, really good if the deinterlacer is up to snuff (the deinterlacer on Toshiba's less expensive sets is not so good in my experience, so hopefully this one will be better).
I do believe you will be able to hook up a Radeon and get XGA in there. But, screwy input modes are de riguer on expensive sets. Take Fujitsu plasmas, for instance, which can be force fed their native rate only with bizarre hardware and not at all with common stuff. I hope to talk with Toshiba in just 2 days.

[BOLD]mark haflich[/BOLD]
AVS Special Member
It does indeed display 1080p. That is the set's primary advantage. It upconverts everything to 1080p. What its deficiency is that it will not accept a 1080p input. Thus every thing ithat is input in p must go through the set's scaler. If the input is i, it must also go through the set's deinterlacer to be converted to p and then scaled to 1080p. The price point of course limits the quality of the deinterlacer/scaler. There are many scalers/deinterlacers better than the set's. It is a shame that the set will not accept a 1080p input thus allowing the input to bypass the set's inferior one. I do not mean inferior as a badge of shame. Its just that the set would be capable of even better performance. Some would not blink at spending the big bucks for a high quality deinterlacer/scaler to get an even better picture. According to the Toshiba engineers, it would cost too much to provide this flexibility.
From what you say, the set is available to any one franchised for the Cinema Series with no line display requirements since many custom guys do not have a showroom or only a minimal showroom. Thus it is time to contact my local distributor to get franchised. We have lots of showrooms but not the ability to display the whole Cinema Series line. For example, we display only one of the three Pioneer Elites but sell all three. Likewise we sell all the Sony's but only display a few.

Sawyer
Member
While we're on the subject of plasmas, I stumbled upon a great write up by Peter Putman from CEIDA on the new plasmas for 2003, among other interesting PQ advances.
It looks like Samsung will be pushing the plasma envelope to 63" with their HPM6315 which will run for about $20,000.
I saw the 61" runco and pioneer plasmas one year ago exactly on display at Harvey's Electronics at the Manhattan 45th St store, which I thought were beautiful (but not $28,000 worth of beauty, though.) I guess to really be able to distinguish between a 61" and a 50" you'd have to have them side by side.
The jest of this write up was that many new DLP tabletops, front and rear projectors will be coming down the pike, which hopefully will mainstream the digital technology, making it affordable to the masses.
Interestingly, also, was that Toshiba will be cranking out a DLP front projector with a Zeiss lens. That makes me wonder what are the optics in the LCoS rear projector?
And still the burning question is how will the 57HLX82 compare side by side with the Samsung 61" DLP RPTV, which would be essentially comparing:
1) 1280 x 720p upscaled to 1920 x 1080p vs 1280 x 720p native
and
2) 1920 x 1080i deinterlaced and doubled to 1920 x 1080p vs 1280 x 720p native.....
I think the only way to find out will be in January if both models happen to be at the CES.....
Who knows, maybe JVC will step up to the plate and use their SXGA (2048 x 1536) D-ILA chip in a RPTV to compete with the Toshiba with NATIVE 1920 x 1080p resolution to prove themselves since they failed miserably with the last LCoS RPTV attempt.

Rogo/Mark
AVS Special Member
Sawyer: Interpolator as I used the term is really not a separate function necessarily. A scaler is the device that takes resolution A and turns it into resolution B.
If you have an input that is 720 x 480, like a DVD, and it's being shown on a display that is 720 x 480, obviously no scaling is required. Anytime there are more pixels, the scaler has to "interpolate" the missing data and create information where the source provides none. So take DVD on that Toshiba and the display has the unenviable task of needing to create the 1.7 million missing pixels.
By contrast, when you take the Samsung DLP at 1280 x 720 and feed it HDTV at 1920 x 1080 (lets just assume for the moment that the internals of the Samsung deinterlace the 1080i feed, which they obviously do, so they end up with true 1920 x 1080 resolution to process) it has to downsample the image and discard data that is already there (again, leaving out the issue of deinterlacing and its ability to create faulty data).
Obviously, it is easier to downsample/downconvert excess data than to guess at the best data to add for a missing 1.7 million pixels. The Toshiba will be working with even less when it gets SDTV that is interlaced. It's going to have to increase the amount of information almost sevenfold, which is not trivial to do. It can be done well, but it's hard.
As for the stretcher, I assume that is for creating a widescreen image out of 4 x 3 image. Again, there are more pixels, so this is something of a scaling function, but is non-linear, and also hard to do well. Witness the stretch modes on various RPTVs with 4 x 3 sources and you can see how this varies in qualities.
One of the odd benefits of the plasmas that are "only 480p" is that they have almost a perfect match for DVD resolution, have to do very little scaling with NTSC (really only deinterlacing and some stretching) and can take the rich HDTV feeds (720p or 1080i) and use only a fraction of the data to create the best possible 400,000 pixel they are capable. The result is often stunning with HD feeds.
I am of the impression based on what I saw, that with the best HDTV feeds (which are few and far between these days) there will at times be detail on the Toshiba that you can't see on any other set. How often the feeds really allow this is not clear. The picture on most of the networks and HBO-HD is great a lot of the time, but still a tad soft and clearly not so rich that it taxes the resolution of most HDTV displays.
It seems to me than a half decade from now, when HD production quality improves and HD DVD becomes real, having 2 million pixels may become important.


Unnoted poster:
So what happens with the 57HLX82 when 1280 x 768 is fed into the VGA input? Do you just get a blank screen? Or what about when it's fed into the DVI-D input?
I just can't see this happening if the $4000 Samsung DLP 507 will accept native 1280 x 768 and the $8000 Toshiba LCoS (with 3 chips) will only accept 1024 x 768....
That's almost as silly as the $15,000 Mitsubishi HD1 DLP WD65000 accepting only 800 x 600, but claiming all the while to be fully PC compatible. What's even funnier, is if you look in the Mitsubishi 2001 and 2002 catalog under the WD65000/WD65100, the artist's rendition of the PC image of windows appears about 1600 x 1200, or at least 1280 x 768, but if you look on the actual enlargement of the back panel VGA input it states '800 x 600' VGA (Dsub 15) input.
Try resetting the resolution of your PC to 800 x 600 for a few seconds just to see how pitiful it looks.
CLOSE QUOTES

Interesting thread. I can’t wait to see one of the units for myself. I will watch that forum for when early adopters post, so far those that originally posted delivery dates revised to just before Christmas have still not received this new Toshiba yet. The only guy with a firm date after his last delivery revision was for today, - hope he gets it. I don’t think this would be a unit I would want myself (especially not at launch price) but I want to follow its launch and see it for myself. I tend to agree with some who think if Toshiba does not launch this unit successfully, - its not good news for the Lcos technology implementation outside other than in FP’s.

Very interesting. I wonder what Toshiba's reasoning is for having no 1080p input. Well I'll check out the set and talk to Toshiba when I go to CES next week.

[This message has been edited by Digital (edited December 27, 2002).]