I've got the chance to get a Samsung PS-42D5SD Plasma TV for what seems to be a very good price, however I don't know much about TV's so I'm looking for advice.

I've found the support pages on the Samsung website however it doesn't tell me much about the TV's spec. I currently have a 37" LCD Samsung 720p TV and while I have no real issues with it the picture at times does seem very blocky.

I know the TV is approx 1-2 years old and this is the only real spec I can find clicky but I don't know if its accurate for the one I've been offered.

If I do decide to buy it it will be used for Sky (non HD), monitor for PC & watching avi's, PS2 and eventually a Wii

Thanks for your advise

Matthew

Edited 16 October, 200916 yr by matt@theforce

Resolution on that model is ED-TV (852 x 480 pixels.)

Unless the price is stunning (under £250 notes for a new one) I wouldn't bother.

I think your tv is a better bet than this yours is 780p? and newer, in the specs i can find for the plasma says it's 480?? I'm sure someone will put me right if i'm wrong.

This might help if like me you never heard of EDTV

Connectivity

As EDTV signals require more bandwidth than is feasible with SDTV connection standards, such as composite video or S-Video, higher bandwidth media must be used to accommodate the additional data transfer. To achieve EDTV, consumer electronic devices such as a progressive scan DVD player or modern video game console must be connected through at least a component video cable (typically using 3 RCA cables for video), a VGA connector, or a DVI or HDMI connector. For over-the-air television broadcasts, EDTV content uses the same connectors as HDTV.

Broadcast and displays

EDTV broadcasts use less digital bandwidth than HDTV, so TV stations can broadcast several EDTV stations at once. Like SDTV, EDTV signals are broadcast with non-square pixels. Because the same amount of horizontal pixels are used in 4:3 or 16:9 broadcasts, the 16:9 mode is sometimes referred to as anamorphic widescreen. Most EDTV displays use square pixels, yielding a resolution of 852×480. However since no broadcasts use this pixel count, such displays always scale anything they display. (The only sources of 852×480 video are internet downloads, such as from iTunes, and some video games). When Plasma EDTVs were common, viewers found that while the TVs were not theoretically HD, downscaled HD signals looked far better than DVDs on such TVs. Unlike 1080i and SDTV formats, plasma displays can show EDTV signals without the need to de-interlace them first. This can result in a reduction of motion artifacts.

DVDs

The progressive output of a DVD player can be considered the baseline for EDTV. Movies shot at 24 frames a second are often encoded onto a DVD at 24 fps progressive, and most DVD players do the 3:2 pulldown conversion internally before feeding the output to (usually) an interlaced display, or here, a progressive 480p display (by repeating some 480p frames 2 times and others 3 times (3:2 pulldown), to make 24fps material play at 60fps). On an EDTV display, or on HDTVs in 480p mode, DVD players can display progressive disc content without needing to convert it to interlaced. Various signal processing tricks are then used to fake progressive scan, and the quality of this depends on how good the upconversion process is.

However, true EDTV can achieve higher quality than DVD, due to native interlaced formats needing vertical filtering on creation to eliminate twitter artefacts. A 480i DVD image will only typically have 360 pixels of effective vertical resolution, even if flagged as progressive.[citation needed]

Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD formats can encode all EDTV forms - but because HDTV is a primary selling point of Blu-ray/HD DVD discs, to date, this has been used only on certain bonus content.

Gaming

The video resolution of video game consoles reached EDTV specifications starting with the Sega Saturn, though it is currently unknown if any of the games developed for it supported it. The Sega Dreamcast expanded on this, becoming the first mainstream console with a VGA output, supporting EDTV. The PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube, Xbox and Wii are also EDTV compatible with a component connection. The Xbox 360 can output 480p via YPbPr component, VGA and HDMI (newer models only) cables. The PlayStation 3 also outputs in 480p (NTSC) and 576p (PAL) via its HDMI, component video(Y/Pr/Pb), and RGB connections. Also, some consumer devices, such as a video game console, typically use a horizontal resolution of 640 square pixels when outputting an EDTV signal, which is already a 4:3 format.