JVC 26" Widescreen LCD - Soft Picture? Are all LCDs like this?

flangemonkey

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Well, I've managed to have a good play with one of these in Currys.

What I am concerned about is the softness of the picture on this display. I'm not sure if it's a trait of LCDs in general, but I took my PS-capable player into Currys with me and hooked it up to the JVC with component leads, and turned PS on on the player, and could see little discernible difference in the picture quality between that and when I connected it via RGB SCART.

The picture through both was fairly detailed, with bright, correct colours, and there was no noticable motion judder or jerk etc. but the crispness to the edges that I get with my CRT (via RGB) was distinctly missing from the JVC LCD, when connected via both component and RGB SCART...

I turned on and off all of the picture "features" in different combinations that the JVC has, but to no avail. I still couldn't get as sharp a picture out of the JVC that would beat my ageing 25" 4:3 Sony CRT. Obviously the screen size is larger, so more flaws in DVD playback would be apparent, but I demo'd Monsters Inc. R2 and some others of very high PQ.

Don't get me wrong. The PQ was good, but I just couldn't see the sharp, crispness from DVDs that I have seen from CRTs...

I'm wanting to try out the 30" Sharp LCD to see if it's a trait of all LCDs, but I was left severly underwhelmed by the image quality of this display...

Does anyone have any thoughts on this?

Am I expecting too much from a LCD to match the crispness of a CRT display?
 
CRT displays are artificially "crisp". The shadow mask structure on CRT TVs is so coarse as to be visible easily. This gives a "fake" impression of sharpness.

A large LCD has a much finer "grid" structure than a CRT TV. The image is scaled to fit this finer grid. This scaling attempts to create more detail than is in the original signal. Doing this causes softness.

It is probably NOT the case that there is less detail on the screen. It is just represented differently.

The key point when auditioning new technology TVs is to watch them from the typical distance you would do at home. Get your nose right up to the screen, studying for flaws, and you'll find them; no question. Watch from a sensible distance and just enjoy the smooth detail.
 

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