What is the best TV for the Wii?

Actually, current LCD's/LED's/plasma's are great for gaming.

So many choices....what's your budget. And do you really want a 20" set or a 40" set? Big difference.

Personallly I'd aim for a 32" Full Screen CRT....I'm sure you can find the used, a Sony Wega would be your best bet and I wouldn't go any lower than 32" as it's the perfect size if you ask me for Wii games. I tried playing my Wii on my brothers 27" Full Screen CRT and it hampered the experience and the visuals werent as pleasing to the eye.

Anyways, if you must get an HDTV....I'd say pass on LCD and go for Plasma. a 42" Plasma(or a 40" LCD) would be great size wise, as it also matches a fullscreen 32" CRT set from top to bottom if we're talking a 40" HDTV, a 42" plasma would be slightly bigger. And as always, with any HDTV the benefits here would be ProgressiveScan and Widescreen. The downside is that the motion will be a bit inferior to CRT(LCD is even worse), there will be some minor lag, you'll get an upscaled(jaggy,depending) image and some slight green trailing IF you look for it, or if it's even noticable.

And I'd recomend getting a 1024x768 Plasma instead of 1080p for your Wii, the less scaling the better regarding PQ and lag. If I were you I'd check out this Samsung.......

Samsung PN42C430 42" 720p Plamsa

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/Samsung+...&skuId=9791253

But with a CRT, you get perfect motion, fantastic color and black levels, zero lag and no upscaled image. You just miss out on the widescreen and progressivescan. Yet some 32" CRT's do infact have progressive scan. Amazon.com has some Sony 32" CRT's for sale if you're interested.

Samsungs have the worst lag. You'll probably want to go with a newer Panasonic plasma. If fast scaling is really important to you, then you'll want to buy this:

http://www.anchorbaytech.com/dvdo_edge/

It'll even make classic game systems playable on your HDTV.

I would go on craigslist and look for a newer model 32" crt. As a matter of fact, I did do that to play my Gamecube and PS2 using component cables! The last models had component inputs and they also have ATSC tuners built-in. While not 480p, the picture will be very nice with excellent color.

I just can't stand sd on a non-crt tv. It just doesn't look quite right. Even at 480p, the Gamecube and PS2 didn't look right to me on either a 37" lcd or a 46" lcd projection.

And if you feel cheated. Then you were cheated by Nintendo. They came out with a 480p console at the same time sd sets were being discontinued. Also, why can't you do local pick-up? Do you live in a rural area that is far away from where the sets are being sold?

My main display is a CRT RPTV (Hitachi) from 2007 - last year Hitachi made CRT based RPTVs. Has been calibrated & had it's factory overscan dialed down quite a bit. Wii, IMO, looks just fine on that set via component cables.

My bro-in-law runs a Wii on a 720p Sony Bravia LCD via component - despite Wii's inherent "jaggy-ness", it looks fine otherwise & appears to have no noticable lag.

Another relative runs a Wii on a newer Panny 1080p plasma via component - as with the above mentioned Sony, jaggies aside, it works great.

I bought a 32" 4:3 crt. The widescreen models are either 30" or 34" tubes and were mostly hd models.


The only EDTV's I remember being sold in 2005/2006 were 42" plasmas. They were as expensive as 720p models. I don't know anyone who bought one of those. The only crt models I remember with 480p were also hdtv's or hd monitors that did 1080i. I remember this because I bought my first hdtv in 2006 and looked at quite a few models before I bought it. EDTV's were disappearing before the Xbox 360 came out (a full year before the Wii). As smart as Nintendo is, I doubt they built the Wii with edtv's in mind.

"it's Plasma which means it won't have the lag issues of an LCD"

No.

Lag on HD panels does not really come down to display type, but is far more reliant on the scaling and image processing chipsets in play. Once you get passed the image processing, between LCD and plasma there really isn't a speed difference. In the case of LCD, you have a bit of motion blur from waiting for the cells to change to the new required color, while in plasma you have a bit of motion blur from waiting for the recently lit cells to decay in their light production. The end result is very similar in regards to speed, lag and motion blur.

While I can understand your ideal of wanting a 480p display to run your 480p console, the real world would like to argue with that a bit. In reality, 480p to 768p/1080p scaling at this point is "good enough", roughly matching what you would get out of a native 480p display. Taking a 480p plasma versus a 1080p plasma and displaying 480p Wii on it, you'll end up with an image that trades off the error of sharp lines at rendered edges being far too blocky due to lack of pixels for the error of sharp lines at rendered edges being a bit blurry due to the scaling. On the plus side though, the black levels on the HD plasma panels are likely to be far nicer than on ED plasma panel, especially if we are talking about buying a current HD model versus a 2006 ED model.

Moving over to a CRT? CRT geometry is crap. If a square doesn't display as a square, then why the hell would you buy the display technology?

End of the day? A good, modern HD plasma or HD LCD will give you a better picture than the best ED plasma or 480i CRT, even on 480p console material.

"But let me see if I understand this... if a hypothetical, modern, small Plasma were created at 480p, it would have considerably less lag than a 1080p or 720p due to not having to scale the image... correct?"

Most likely not. The Wii spits out 480p, which is called 480p and not 720x480 for a reason, as the horizontal is effectively infinite in resolution, being an analog signal. While the Wii is rendering a roughly 640x480 image, a widescreen ED display has a resolution of ~848x480. So 480p out of the Wii is still scaled to fit the display on the horizontal, and that isn't even considering the likely overscan correction that will take place resulting in probably the middle 640x448 of the ~720x480 image being scaled up to 848x480. No matter what, that 480p will be scaled, it's just a matter of by how much.

"My biggest concern is getting rid of input lag, yet still being able to use progressive scan and widescreen."

For reference, both my 2008 50" Panasonic plasma and 2009 32" Panasonic LCD test out with the Rock Band 2 auto-calibrating guitar at 32ms of lag, or roughly two frames. Given that 16ms lag is an absolute must seeing as that the length of a frame, my displays lag by a single addition frame. It is unnoticeable in even the most dire of time-sensitive situations.

"And out of curiosity... does the amount of scaling really make a difference? Is a 720p really better than a 1080p? If so, then it seems logical to think that 480p would be even better, right?"

Nope. Once the display has made the decision to scale something, the resolutions in play don't really matter. The physical act of calculating the stretch from 720p to 1080p, or 1080p to 768p, or 480p to 1080p, or 480p to 768p are all extremely fast. Stretching an image is not computationally intensive. Exaggerated lag usually comes from other sources, such as taking 16ms to capture an entire frame's worth of information to work with, and comparing frames to the previous and next one in order to do any sort of temporal filtering.

My advice? Pick a size that you want. Look for a display with good black levels. On plasmas that means looking for black that looks black, not grey. On LCDs that means looking for black that doesn't look dark neon-blue. Then pack up your Wii, Rock Band 2, and the official Rock Band 2 Wireless Guitar and go down to a store to start testing for lag on the displays that you like. I'd start with the current Panasonics and Samsungs. Samsung still has a reputation for being laggy, but is merely a hold-over from ~2006. Modern LCD/plasmas really are better displays than any CRT or ED plasma ever made, even for 480p rendered content. There is just a serious case of people looking back with rose tinted glasses at how great they remember their CRTs being.

Mt Panasonic TC-L32S1 has been tested and rated on these very forums by Pro gamers and tester here to have NO INPUT LAG.

I am also a bit of a perfectionist and I do not like to compromise.

Thankfully I have NO LAG. I was playing New Super Mario All day today and even though the TV chip has to process 480p to 1080p theres no lag that I can detect and I am sensitive enough to know it.

Only problem I am running into is less than stellar PQ picture quality which I am blaming on cheaply made Component cables.

Of course the BEST TV for the NIntendo Wii is a HD CRT. But very few of those were made, just as the CRT era died.

Hey man I wanna let you know I feel your pain. Even though I am not yet in the market for a new TV as I do have the ideal TV for SD and HD which is a Sony XBR970. However knowing that my TV may not last forever, I am worried about what I'm going to do when that horrible day comes that my CRT bites the dust. I have thought this over and over again on what I would do in your situation and here is what I have for you.

I run NES, SNES, N64, Wii PS1, PS2, XBOX, Saturn through one TV with SNES and N64 running through s-video which is even scarier since s-video is just about gone on all modern TVs. So I want all my SD to look great and more importantly have no lag.

The first thing is not to get a screen that is too big for SD viewing. It sounds like you kinda got a handle on all that since you want between a 20-40 inch display. Many people don't realize that their HDTV is much bigger than their previous one and are repulsed at all the jaggies that SD graphics inherently have even with perfect processing. Hence the reason HD was invented in the first place.

Secondly you need to know that modern TVs are many times sharper than any CRT TV ever could hope to be. I brought my Wii over to a friend's house who has a 50 inch 720p Sammy. I discovered that the default sharpness level on the component input was way too sharp and brought it from like 60 to 10 and it was still extremely sharp, but made the Wii look nice. CRT TVs naturally are much smoother, and that's the reason why CRT HDTVs suck as computer monitors.

Third, when you're shopping for your TV, buy at a place that has a good return policy. Depending on how much luck you have getting someone to let you hook and play something to perhaps multiple TVs, you may just have to buy and return a few TVs. I've searched, and there really is not that many resources to find which TVs lag the least on SD (surprisingly). Have no shame though in returning. Manufacturers and retailers have not taken people like us into consideration who are not ready to switch everything we hook to TVs to HD. It's a shame that there is no for sure way to tell if a TV is right for what you wanna do with it without just trying it all out for yourself.

One possibility I have looked at which still doesn't look like a bad idea is to get an external video scaler. http://shoryuken.com/f177/hdtvs-vide...olution-94426/ This is a link to another forum thread that is dedicated to discussing lag. It has some links to some external devices that you can hook between your SD components and your HDTV to pre-scale the image to HD quickly so all the TV has to do is display the picture with very minimal processing. It seems that such devices range from 50 to 500 bucks, but in the end I think it would be worth not having to think about if my TV was capable of not lagging.

For sure the fight is not fair. Even HD consoles are having problems because many games run in 720p and need to be upscaled to 1080p which can introduce significant lag. I think Plasma TVs got sort of the reputation for having little to no lag because Plasma TVs are still offered in 720p in large sizes as where every LCD above 32 inches is 1080p. However when it comes to SD, upscaling from even 480p vs. 480i to 720p can cause big lag.

Bottom line is there is no reference. There are TVs out there for you and I but nobody can tell us which ones they are, and the people who can tell us won't tell us. Good luck on your search. Like I said it's out there, you just have to find it. Now find your TV and have absolutely no mercy and make no compromises.

One last thing. Who the F has never heard of Pioneer? Apparently you lol. Pioneer has been around for decades. They make low to high end consumer electronics including TVs and audio equipment.