Wow, the superior color and blacks of CRTS really makes a difference

I was at Pamida a little bit ago and was looking at their LCDs. Because it is Pamida they only have cheaper ones, the most expensive I saw was $1,200. I've been a little bummed that the resolution on my xbr970 is only 853 X 1080. It doesn't bother me for TV so much as it does 360 games. I want my 360 to look as awesome as possible, it's the reason I bought a new TV to begin with. Knowing that I'm missing 1,000 lines of resolution in Gears of War has been driving me crazy. Because of that I've been thinking about replacing my xbr970 with a 1080p LCD. Pamida didn't have any 1080p LCDS, they were all the standard 768p models. They were playing one of those computer animated movies similar to Toy Story on one of the cable HD stations. Immediately I didn't think the picture looked as good on any of them as mine. In fact, strangely enough I thought the picture was slightly blurry despite having many more lines of resolution than mine and being progressive. I had a friend with me and as soon as I got home I turned my TV to the same channel. No doubt, the picture was sharper, more colorful and overall just more vibrant. My friend agreed. To me this was really weird. Why did those sets look slightly blurry compared to mine despite the higher resolution and progressive picture? Perhaps the perception of blurriness may have been due to the lack of good shading between the different colors? Or maybe they weren't hooked up right? But the program playing was full widescreen so it couldn't have been SD. Mind you these were cheap LCDs. I know a $2000-$3000 1080p LCD from a good company would certainly look better than those did. But the experience made me feel a lot better about my set despite its low resolution. Man, can you imagine how absolutely fantastic a CRT would look if it actually did have a 1920 X 1080 picture? Or better yet how incredible it would look if it was progressive? I really wish one of the better manufacturers would put out a CRT with these kinds of features as kind of like a last hoorah for CRT technology. It would totally blow everything else away.

Yeah, I live in a little redneck town too.

Yeah, I know that the pixel counts of xbr970 and 720p signal are similar but I had expected that the progressive nature of the LCDs vs the interlaced picture of the CRT would give the LCD a big sharpness edge, especially given all the fast movement in games. I've seen 768p LCDs before but that was always when driving to Canton which is a little over a 1/2 hour drive from here. It was always difficult to keep in my mind exactly the picture I had seen so that when I got home I could compare. But Pamida is less than a mile from my place and I hadn't even known they sold HDTVs there, lol.

But no games on 360 are less than 720p. 720p is a minimum standard that Microsoft has set. A game can't even be published if it is lower than that. There are allegedly a few 360 games that are optimized for 1080i but I don't know if that is true or not or what games they would be. I've also heard that some 1080p optimized ( Or native, whatever you want to call it. ) are on the way like Virtua Tennis 3.

OK, I think you might be right about Project Gotham Racing, heh heh. I've heard that MS broke their own rule and that there are moments when that game dips a tad below 720p. But I guess you can get away with that when it is your own rule, heh heh. But that is the exception rather than the norm. MS has rules in place ( That 3rd parties have to follow anyway. ) that all games must be a minimum of 720p and all games must have achievement points. If I remember right ( And it was quite a long time ago that I heard about it so the details are very fuzzy. ) MS got quite a bit of flack about PGR3 so I wouldn't count on that happening again.