Plasma HTDV Comparison

This brand new Pyle LCD HDTV may be great for watching TV or DVDs, but its analog to digital conversion produces a very noticeable latency (lag) on the video, which renders classic video games nearly unplayable due to the delay between when something happens and when it actually shows up on the screen. You can compare the “lag” of the Pyle TV with a classic original 1983 Amdek Color-I monitor placed underneath it, showing the correct undelayed video. This lag (which averages about 1/10th of a second) is due to the TV de-interlacing the analog video and upscaling it to HDTV resolution. A *non-HDTV* flat-panel TV (known as “EDTV” or “480P”) will have much less lag because it doesn’t need to do any upscaling, and a CRT picture tube TV will have no lag at all, even if it has a “480i” digital TV tuner built-in. Aside from the latency problems, this Pyle TV has very poor picture quality when using the composite video input. Even with its “3D digital comb filter” enabled, any text or sharp edges on the screen are laced with large amounts of mulicolored blur. In fact, the display is less sharp and crisp than the 26-year-old Amdek monitor, which has *no* comb filter and a large dot pitch CRT — not to mention that the Amdek is tremendously brighter and more vivid, and has a much better sounding built-in speaker. The moral of the story: only use a new digital HDTV for playing video games if you are using a modern game console through a digital HDMI connection, in which case the …