newcoppiceman
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Some help, please, for this old-school type who now has to consider making the move to flat-screen viewing as our 28" Panasonic CRT TV approaches retirement.
As a BBC-trained engineer who worked in Television Centre studios in the 80s, and latterly for Channel 4, picture quality has always been of paramount importance to me. In my work I encountered so-called "Grade 1" monitors used in places like studio galleries; their job was to add nothing to, nor take anything away from, the signals they were fed with. They used professional high resolution CRTs (often with the original delta gun arrangement), had lots of adjustments (for things like convergence and beam landing) and gave stunning pictures, especially when fed RGB straight from the studio cameras. They had separate EHT (the high voltage used to fling the electrons at the screen phosphors) and line scan stages - these are always combined in consumer products - which meant there were no geometric distortions caused by beam current (brightness) variations. Another feature was that these monitors had absolutely no provision for audio. Needless to say, they cost thousands.
This was all pre-digital and pre-HD.
Appalled by the pictures produced by the early flat-screen TVs when compared even to consumer CRT TVs I vowed never to touch them with a barge-pole and undertook a long-term project to preserve one of the EV1629 widescreen CRT monitors (vintage 1994) I bought from Channel 4 when the tubes eventually failed. Amazingly, Philips were happy to send me (for free!) two brand-new 28" widescreen CRTs and with enough spare boards and components I was set fair for many, many years' high quality CRT viewing. There's a picture on my Flickr photostream of the EV1629 set up at home at Flickr: newcoppiceman's Photostream
I suspect that even now CRT pictures remain the gold standard - but sticking with CRT means no HD so I have, a bit reluctantly, begun to think about options for flat-screen viewing.
We would probably want a 32" display - certainly no larger - and a 28" one might suffice. Also, I like simple, so wondered whether a really high-quality PC monitor (no tuners, no audio provision) capable of displaying cracking HD TV pictures in its native resolution (with minimal motion and other artefacts) would be a possibility (rather than a conventional TV)? This could be used with a high quality standalone upscaler for non-HD sources such as the RGB outputs from our existing PVR and Y/C from the S-VHS VCR.
Any suggestions for either or both the monitor and upscaler would be very much appreciated.
As a BBC-trained engineer who worked in Television Centre studios in the 80s, and latterly for Channel 4, picture quality has always been of paramount importance to me. In my work I encountered so-called "Grade 1" monitors used in places like studio galleries; their job was to add nothing to, nor take anything away from, the signals they were fed with. They used professional high resolution CRTs (often with the original delta gun arrangement), had lots of adjustments (for things like convergence and beam landing) and gave stunning pictures, especially when fed RGB straight from the studio cameras. They had separate EHT (the high voltage used to fling the electrons at the screen phosphors) and line scan stages - these are always combined in consumer products - which meant there were no geometric distortions caused by beam current (brightness) variations. Another feature was that these monitors had absolutely no provision for audio. Needless to say, they cost thousands.
This was all pre-digital and pre-HD.
Appalled by the pictures produced by the early flat-screen TVs when compared even to consumer CRT TVs I vowed never to touch them with a barge-pole and undertook a long-term project to preserve one of the EV1629 widescreen CRT monitors (vintage 1994) I bought from Channel 4 when the tubes eventually failed. Amazingly, Philips were happy to send me (for free!) two brand-new 28" widescreen CRTs and with enough spare boards and components I was set fair for many, many years' high quality CRT viewing. There's a picture on my Flickr photostream of the EV1629 set up at home at Flickr: newcoppiceman's Photostream
I suspect that even now CRT pictures remain the gold standard - but sticking with CRT means no HD so I have, a bit reluctantly, begun to think about options for flat-screen viewing.
We would probably want a 32" display - certainly no larger - and a 28" one might suffice. Also, I like simple, so wondered whether a really high-quality PC monitor (no tuners, no audio provision) capable of displaying cracking HD TV pictures in its native resolution (with minimal motion and other artefacts) would be a possibility (rather than a conventional TV)? This could be used with a high quality standalone upscaler for non-HD sources such as the RGB outputs from our existing PVR and Y/C from the S-VHS VCR.
Any suggestions for either or both the monitor and upscaler would be very much appreciated.