Stair Steps and Jagged Edges

Looks like no one answered you Please check my post here that refers to your question and see if it helps in a way:
http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showt...4#post22021904

There is no way a VT50 or E7000 would do this worse than your old RPTV. Since you mentioned your viewing distance of your own TV but not of the TVs you looked at at the stores, i presume you were standing abnormally close to those TVs and yes if you get close enough to even the best TVs, you'll start to see normal stuff like jaggies and stair-stepping and SDE etc along with other anomalies. Pixels are pixels regardless if the TV is an RPTV, LCD, or Plasma. But at a proper viewing distance this stuff becomes much less apparent and usually isn't visible at all.

Another possible/probable cause is that TVs in the stores are improperly set to their Vivid and Dynamic picture modes with the Sharpness setting cranked way up and that makes the TVs look harsh. The stores also tend to have less-than-optimal signals to their TVs. Those same TVs in a home environment with proper settings and normal viewing distances will look better than any RPTV.

With the exception of some Very Large Letters being displayed on-screen, would second the notion that you were probably viewing from a Closer-Than-Normal distance.

At the same time, always BELIEVED that a CRT with a dot (round hole) shadow mask did NOT show off "jaggies" as much as other screen types.

Of course, that would be because the SOFTNESS of the picture on such a panel tends to "smooth out" minor jaggies. HOWEVER, this also assumes that you are viewing from a "normal" distance!

Were the stairsteps noticeable only on subtitles or on, for example, edges on buildings in the movie/tv show?
Movie/tv content can be very different than graphic content. Often things like subtitles aren't smoothed for display and will show up where edges in the movie won't. Take a good BD in with you and see if that shows the problem. In general I think you will find that the improved "sharpness" inherent in lcd/plasma vs. crt based rptv will be a benefit. Perhaps, though, it is one of those things that just bothers you, and you'll have to be careful to find a display that minimizes it. Or you could just fool around with the sharpness setting on the TV and see if you can find a setting you can live with.

Stair stepping and jaggies are often caused by overly compressed signals and double scaling. It's not uncommon to see these type artifacts on display, especially in the big box stores where TV's and their sources aren't calibrated correctly or fed programing that is optimized for the best picture quality.


Ian

Mostly agree but problem is sharpness is EXACTLY the reason for jaggies vs CRT or projection based displays. Sharpness is also ONE of the reason for motion blur, which is why for motion picture we always turn down sharpness. One of the remedy would be to go higher resolution ie 4k or retina such that the eye can no longer differentiate the edges.

In short I don't think the OP is seeing things that's not there as many would have claimed. It is certainly most noticeable for text and lines because the brain knows how it SHOULD look like. But most of the time we don't know how a picture eg flower should look like around the edges so we have no frame of reference and hence ignored

1-the demo loop in most Sears stores at the time you went consisted mainly of badly upconverted SD commercials for Consumer Cellular phones and vacuum cleaners. Should have been updated and somewhat improved since then.

2-Most stores have the sets in default vivid or dynamic mode with sharpness turned too high. Next time you see this effect in a store ask for the remote and turn down the sharpness.

3-viewing distance does have an effect on visibility of stair-stepping.

4-unless mechanical and electronic focus is tweaked to the max on an rptv these is some softness to the picture that disguises these effects vs a flat panel set.