I’m happy to announce that the Trotz household has finally entered the HDTV-age. Since I’ve been working for a broadcast company heavily involved in HD technologies for the last several years, I’ve been eager to experience this at home. After much research, agonizing, and negotiations with my lovely wife, we purchased a Sony KDS-R50XBR1 Grand Wega SXRD rear projection television last weekend. We talked about buying the 60″ version – Best Buy was selling both the 50 and 60 for the same price – but Amy knew that the 60″ would be waaaay to big for our living room.
I finally cancelled my DirecTV service last week – the constant outages and costs to upgrade to support HD (a new dish for $300, a new HD-DVR for $500-1000, new boxes for my other two rooms ($250+)). So we’ve been enjoying free over-the-air HD. It’s kinda sick that there is such a beautiful TV signal just floating in the air for anyone to pickup. I’m looking forward to today’s visit from the Comcast guy however – they should be bringing Motorola’s latest and greatest – the 6412 dual-tuner DVR. That baby has all sorts of features I’m eager to check out, including the ability to output recorded HD content over it’s Firewire ports to a Mac.I can finally get back to seeing how our own networks look, especially the Law and Order HD channel. Oops, I mean TNT!
technorati tags: sxrd, lcos, sony, hdtv
Some useful links about the new setup:
- Sound & Vision Magazine’s review that convinced me this was probably the set to buy
- Product page on Sonystyle.com
- Samsung’s 50″ 1080p, the HL-R5078W
Anyway, for those among you interested in the sordid geeky details of why I choose this one – it uses ‘SXRD’ (Silicon X-tal Reflective Display – a new display technology developed by Sony as a variant of the better-known LCOS or Liquid Crystal on Silicon. This spiffy set uses three separate panels (one each for red, blue and green) and projects these onto the screen for a 1920x1080p HDTV image. I considered the 1080p series from both Samsung and HP, but several reviews sold me on the Sony based on the better controls and details offered by their SXRD format. There’s also the missing ‘color wheel’ used in traditional DLP – there, instead of having three panels there’s a single one with an RGB color wheel spinning in front. I’ve heard various reports of costly repairs to replace those. And while I never saw them in the store, some users do report a ‘rainbow’ effect on some high-key source material (think white-on-white scenes with pans and zooms).
This set is the 3rd generation of Sony SXRD technology, and the first in the price range of mere mortals (compared to the Qualia 70″ at over $10k or their first version at $27k a few years back).
The .61″ panel in this set is the worlds smallest, and combined with some signal processing produces a contrast ratio of 10,000:1, and a response time of less than 5ms – good enough for the highest action video sources. At this size, and via what Sony claims is an exclusive manufacturing process (until they license it I guess), the narrow spacing they provide between pixels in the panels elminates the well-known DLP ‘screen-door’ effect.