Critical-Test-4446
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What Hi-Fi went digging through their own archives for the first time they reviewed each new TV format, and the pattern that falls out is the same one we argue about every January.
The first flatscreen LCD they saw with a genuine native 1080p panel was the Sharp LC-45GD1E in 2005, at GBP 5,500 for 45 inches. It looked superb fed proper Full HD off a home cinema PC and was noticeably worse than cheaper 42-inch plasmas at upscaling standard definition - which was almost everything anyone actually watched, since Freeview had only started in 2002 and BBC HD and Sky HD did not launch until May 2006. Most sets of that era were HD-Ready at 1280 x 720 or 768 and just downscaled whatever you fed them. The first Full HD plasma, Pioneer's PDP-5000EX, arrived in 2006 at GBP 7,000. The first OLED they got hold of was the Sony XEL-1 in 2008.
So: cost a fortune, no content to feed it, and worse than the outgoing cheaper technology at the job you did most of the time. That is not a story about 2005. That is 4K in 2013 when nothing was mastered for it, and it is 8K right now, where the entire case rests on upscaling because native material does not exist outside demo loops.
The honest version is that new panel tech is worth paying for when it fixes something you can see on the content you already own, not when it adds pixels you have no source for. OLED cleared that bar. 3D and 8K did not.
Which format did you buy into earliest, and did it end up feeling early or just expensive?
The first flatscreen LCD they saw with a genuine native 1080p panel was the Sharp LC-45GD1E in 2005, at GBP 5,500 for 45 inches. It looked superb fed proper Full HD off a home cinema PC and was noticeably worse than cheaper 42-inch plasmas at upscaling standard definition - which was almost everything anyone actually watched, since Freeview had only started in 2002 and BBC HD and Sky HD did not launch until May 2006. Most sets of that era were HD-Ready at 1280 x 720 or 768 and just downscaled whatever you fed them. The first Full HD plasma, Pioneer's PDP-5000EX, arrived in 2006 at GBP 7,000. The first OLED they got hold of was the Sony XEL-1 in 2008.
So: cost a fortune, no content to feed it, and worse than the outgoing cheaper technology at the job you did most of the time. That is not a story about 2005. That is 4K in 2013 when nothing was mastered for it, and it is 8K right now, where the entire case rests on upscaling because native material does not exist outside demo loops.
The honest version is that new panel tech is worth paying for when it fixes something you can see on the content you already own, not when it adds pixels you have no source for. OLED cleared that bar. 3D and 8K did not.
Which format did you buy into earliest, and did it end up feeling early or just expensive?
