i spent a few hours this evening testing around with my PRO1000HD; including a lengthy vox session with ericbee and jlm (thanks guys).
i'm relatively new to the world of plasmas (this is my first), but one thing that i'd stress to other folks who haven't had the "pleasure" of finding this out, is that native rate matters.
my understanding is that in the past, PDPs have had two very distinct modes: "pc mode" and "video mode". certain combinations of settings would cause a PDP to "lock into PC mode" at which point the image apparently looked crappy and all sorts of unpleasant stuff happened (hordes of locusts, your wife leaves you, etc.). so it was to be avoided.
it is no longer clear (according to doody - for whatever that's worth) that these distinctions are so important. the pioneers do "lock into pc mode", but the differences are not that radical and most importantly these things want to be in native rate mode.
1280x768 looks way nicer than 1280x720 (which doesn't lock into pc mode, fyi), for example. for those pc geeks in the crowd, this is intuitive. try to run your laptop's LCD screen in anything but it's native rate. go ahead. i dare you. it doesn't really work. if you can get the settings to change, it looks HORRIBLE. not bad, horrible. there are X by Y pixels and you want to feed the unit X by Y pixels or else the unit has to guess what is intended. sometimes it guesses well. sometimes it doesn't. in theory, your PDP can do a way better job of guessing than your laptop can, but it's still guessing.
of course, as jlm astutely pointed out, i wasn't running digital into the PDP. it's still an analog signal coming off the GeForce3 card, so it's not entirely an accurate soap box to mount, but it is by all means a directionally correct one. i can only imagine what 1280x768 will look like via DVI. yowza.
525i couldn't hold a candle (Meridian 596 DVD player). i'm sure it looks GREAT on an NTSC device that is scan-line based, but that's not a PDP.
ericbee and jlm are going to do a pile of testing on scalers with the PRO1000HD, hopefully next week. it'll be very interesting to see how those tests pan out.
all this said, i'm not saying that Gladiator at 525i via component looked like doggy doo doo - it didn't. but comparatively it was a big difference.
so i'd urge all critical viewers investing big money in expensive PDPs to at least try out a scaler (HTPC or otherwise) that can do native tate on these things. but you might want to have your wife hide your wallet first ;-)
enjoy!
doody.
i'm relatively new to the world of plasmas (this is my first), but one thing that i'd stress to other folks who haven't had the "pleasure" of finding this out, is that native rate matters.
my understanding is that in the past, PDPs have had two very distinct modes: "pc mode" and "video mode". certain combinations of settings would cause a PDP to "lock into PC mode" at which point the image apparently looked crappy and all sorts of unpleasant stuff happened (hordes of locusts, your wife leaves you, etc.). so it was to be avoided.
it is no longer clear (according to doody - for whatever that's worth) that these distinctions are so important. the pioneers do "lock into pc mode", but the differences are not that radical and most importantly these things want to be in native rate mode.
1280x768 looks way nicer than 1280x720 (which doesn't lock into pc mode, fyi), for example. for those pc geeks in the crowd, this is intuitive. try to run your laptop's LCD screen in anything but it's native rate. go ahead. i dare you. it doesn't really work. if you can get the settings to change, it looks HORRIBLE. not bad, horrible. there are X by Y pixels and you want to feed the unit X by Y pixels or else the unit has to guess what is intended. sometimes it guesses well. sometimes it doesn't. in theory, your PDP can do a way better job of guessing than your laptop can, but it's still guessing.
of course, as jlm astutely pointed out, i wasn't running digital into the PDP. it's still an analog signal coming off the GeForce3 card, so it's not entirely an accurate soap box to mount, but it is by all means a directionally correct one. i can only imagine what 1280x768 will look like via DVI. yowza.
525i couldn't hold a candle (Meridian 596 DVD player). i'm sure it looks GREAT on an NTSC device that is scan-line based, but that's not a PDP.
ericbee and jlm are going to do a pile of testing on scalers with the PRO1000HD, hopefully next week. it'll be very interesting to see how those tests pan out.
all this said, i'm not saying that Gladiator at 525i via component looked like doggy doo doo - it didn't. but comparatively it was a big difference.
so i'd urge all critical viewers investing big money in expensive PDPs to at least try out a scaler (HTPC or otherwise) that can do native tate on these things. but you might want to have your wife hide your wallet first ;-)
enjoy!
doody.