Worth buying a scaler for cheap/avg panel ?

[jassi_hayre]

I'm confused

I want a panny / fuji panel and scaler (hopefully Lumagen) later on. Wife wants cheap screen i.e. Haier + holiday.

Since the Haier is £1800 I could get the screen, scaler and a weekend holiday possibly !

My question is - would a scaler make an average screens pq good ?

Thanks
Jas

[Liam @ Prog AV]

In some ways it would give more of an improvement than with a good screen since the processing in the average screen will be poor. However a poorly built plasma panel will always suffer phsyical issues such as colour banding, dithering, poor black level/detail, loudness of panel, reliability...

I don't have a clue about this haier though, it may not even accept a native resolution signal for example in which case it would be useless for a scaler!!!

[Gordon @ Convergent AV]

Cheaper plasma's tend to suffer from internal processing that is so poor even adding outside help isn't enough. As Liam says the postersation on some of these things is so horrendous that you'll just end up kicking yourself as it'll look so nasty unless you sit half a mile away ( I have not seen the model you speak of). You may actually be better considering a good SD panel like a Pansonic pwd7/8....

Gordon