Samsung HDTV Vs Projectors?

Hiya all,

I saw Samsung 40" HD Ready 1080p in Argos which was selling at 599 pounds and also I saw Optoma HD65 DLP Projector selling at 499 pounds.

I love to play on big screen with my Playstation 3.

The questions is which one is better?

Samsung make gorgeous screens, so my money would be on that.

Well, I don't know what the image quality is like, but a projector you'll need a screen for, and the bulbs burn out, and you need a place to put it behind the couch where you won't block the picture.

But you can get a bigger picture.

@Swift yes agreed - bulbs are very expensive too.

Be very aware though ensure it says FULL HD not HD Ready. If you are not sure, look around at the other FULL HD screens and wonder to yourself why their prices are sooo much higher.

Also get a long close up look at the colour patterning especially in Black and none detailed stuff such as large swatches of colours. The cheaper sets appear to only decode upto something like 256,000 colours not 16.7 million.


IPete2.

I have a 40" 1080P Samsung panel it was well worth the money and looks gorgeous, I have it wall mounted and strongly recommend it. The newest model is the next one they made after mine and has a few nice extras and due to the credit crunch is cheaper now than when I bought mine.

Although you can go bigger with a projector I'm not really sure why you would want to. 40"-42" is more or less optimum for 1080P resolution and you will need to sit ~ at least 8-10' from the screen or it will look bad. If you go for a 50" projector you need to be at ~ 14' away and you have problem with the projector needing LOS to the screen and being easily blocked when people move around.

This is the sucessor to my screen.

http://www.hdtvorg.co.uk/reviews/lcd/Samsung_LE40A656.htm

BTW make sure when/if you do get your panel you change the settings to optimum, factory defaults for almost all LCD TVs suck.

Darkheart

Samsung produce cracking LCDs. I would go with that. Projectors can be great and offer an even bigger viewing area, but they're not really for every day use as you need a dark room to see a decent contrast from them.

If you do get the Samsung, a note of warning. Ours produced some really weird 'trail' effect with digital tv. The problem was remedied by switching off some of the 'image enhancement' processing in the TV.

That's not exactly a ringing endorsement. :-)

LOL!

John,
I agree some of the extra functions and features do more harm than good but it is so situational and depends on wether your watching SD or HD and how good your Digital Signal is. Virgin's cable TV signal in my area (West Yorkshire) is excellent, so I have some of the bells and whistles off too.

One other point is I see no reason to go beyond 1080P for a considerable amount of time as this is the default resolution for most films and the highest supported for games and is likely to be so for some time, going beyond it won't improove the experience much until we get to screens that are taking up most of your wall (60" and beyond). Movies in 1080P look awesome BTW.

Darkheart

I don't buy Samsung products as they put a lot of their money into 1 shot 1 kill drone weapons research which is deployed along the Korean border to stop civilians fleeing oppression.

The screens look lovely though

Yay for 1 shot 1 kill drone weapons! Where's my cheque book?

I have a home theater in my house with a HD projector. These guys are right, no matter how good your projector, you are going to need a room you can keep dark. My theater is a converted garage bay, so it has no windows. Very easy to keep it dark, the sliding pocket door is closed and the heavy velvet theater style curtain is pulled closed over it :)

I agree, DH. I was just making sure he knows what the problem is when every film looks like an eighties pop video!

I would go for the Samsung TV as well, wait, I already did :-)

I use a 32" Samsung TV as Monitor mostly and everything looks really sharp. You can never get that quality from a projector. A projector can give you a bigger area to look at but quality goes down with size.

Quality goes down with size? I am not sure I agree with this. Sure, the larger the picture, the bigger the pixels are going to be. But, it all depends on how far from the screen you sit. They say the closest you should be to a screen is one and a half times the width. My screen is 8' wide in my theater and the first row of my seating is 12 feet, so it fits this bill exactly. With the next two rows each being another 6 feet back.

So, what you should really do when choosing a large screen TV is measure how far you are going to be sitting from it, then divide by 1.5 and that is how wide your screen should be (that distance is not the diagonal width, like most screens are measured, it is how WIDE the screen should be).

We got a Phillips 42" LCD a few months back when our CRT telly broke after 3 years.... Very pleased. Binned Sky and are getting freesat int 2 weeks time - glorious HD pictures, and all for a one of £150 - no subscription and a damn site less adverts!

I see your point about the Samsung image quality, I'm quite picky & Phillips is pretty sharp. Projector+bulbs+close the curtains, nah LCD TV.