DLP High Definition TV sets and Video Games

The Purchase:
Well, I wanted to start off this section with information about a recent problem I had. It starts off a long time ago? about two months ago actually? I decided I wanted to be apart of the HD (High Definition) Era and upgrade my TV to a Samsung HLN507 DLP widescreen HD television. Now if you don?t know what all that stuff means.. all it means is that it is a new BIG TV with high clarity for high definition. Either way? I bought it because I enjoy good movies and good video games? especially HALO2. I would consider myself a gamer who loves games but also can separate them from reality (In other words I did not dress up to go see star wars revenge of the sith nor do I have tomb raider pictures on my wall).

Testing the TV with Games (Halo 2):
So I was really excited to at a new TV that was advertised as being a ?gamers? TV. Well? I was extremely disappointed. At first, the TV was great! It was so.. high-Def-y! The picture was great! I watch 24 (24 the tv show on fox) in high def on it and loved it! Then came the video games. Now I bought the high-def pack for the Xbox so it was being played natively at 480p (because halo 2 does not support high def (720p)). And guess what.. there were LAG issues. At first it was tough to notice? I just thought my playing went down and that I had to get used to the size of the TV. But after a good 15 minutes.. I realized that the lag was NOT because of online play, it was because of LAG between the TV and the Xbox. In other words, I would press a button and there would be a slight delay between the button push and the relative action on the TV. Now.. I thought at first.. this is ok? because it is worth sacrificing my playing ability a little bit for a cool TV. But it did not hurt it a little bit? the more I played I realized that it really brought down my game play, and I just got frustrated. Thus? I decided to look into it.

The Fixes:
So I went online to a couple of forums and tried to look into some possible problems. So I saw that there was a ?Sync Pack? for the tv, where Samsung replaces (it seems) half of the guts to the TV. Well, they did that and guess what? it still had lag issues. Now some people said they did not notice the lag. Well either your not a serious gamer and just don?t notice the lag or you are lying to yourself. Because all the tv?s have the same guts whether with the sync kit or not, thus you get the same tv production, and I know my tv had lag, thus if you think your does not? well your just wrong. If you want to prove it, play a football game or a baseball game and start pitching on a normal tube tv then do the same test on your DLP, you will experience the lag. So I gave up on the Samsung DLP. I took it back and went to the Mitsubishi WD-52525.

The New TV? To Lag or not to Lag.
Now the Mitsubishi is $699 more than the Samsung, it also is 2 inches larger and it has a built in HD tuner. Here is a analogy, Samsung is to Volkswagen as Mitsubishi is to Lexus. So inherently the Mitsubishi is a much nicer TV. Anyway? on to the video game test. So before I went to buy the TV I went to my local electronics store (Ultimate Electronics) and hooked my Xbox into a couple of other TV?s I was interested in. I tried to see which ones had lag and which ones did not. The game I tested was MVP baseball 2005. And from what I noticed it seemed the was little to no noticeable lag. So I was excited! So when I got my TV home I put it to the Halo2 test. And guess what? There WAS lag! I could not understand it! It was not near as bad as the Samsung, but it is still there. So I had to look into it more.

The Exhaustive Research:
So after many hours or research on the web and calling Mitsubishi and getting the software upgrades, here is what I have found. The reason that my baseball game (MVP Baseball 2005) did not lag, was because it was built for hi-def sets, it was 720p with a 16:9 ratio. To give a quick overview of what all those #?s mean read on, here is the quick cheat sheet.

High Definition Standards and Nomenclature:
I = interlaced
P = progressive

Definition:
Interlaced: When TV got downgraded to 29.97 frames per second to allow the bandwidth for color, the vertical lines were ?painted? in an interlaced style, which means it will take every other line on every other frame. Here is an example, picture the American flag, imagine that every other 30th of a second the red lines were painted and every other 30th of a second the white lines were painted, that is how interlaced works. So it is not very crisp because those lines sometimes just do not match up.
Progressive: Now progressive is a lot more clear! Imagine someone took a picture 30 times a second and placed the entire image on the screen every 30th of a second. That is progressive. You can see the difference between the two in text, text that is painted interlaced style kind of dances, and text painted progessivly is perfect.

Note: The numbers in the following definitions represent the number of vertical lines on any given frame.

480i – Standard for digital television and standards DVD?s.
480p ? Standard for DVD?s played through a progressive scan DVD player.
720i – Not really used.
720p ? The first TRUE high-definition standard. DLP TV?s are natively this conversion.
1080i ? The other TRUE high-definition standard. Slightly, I mean slightly higher quality than 720p.
1080p ? The super high-definition standard. Very few TV?s or broadcasts support this conversion ratio.

The Exhaustive Research ? Part 2:
So with all that stuff in your brain now all you have to remember is this, DLP (Digital Light Processing) which is the style of TV I bought is natively 720p, so in games that do not support 720p like Halo 2, the TV has to ?down convert?, which means it has to try hard to be at a lower quality. Thus, there is a delay between the button press on the Xbox and the relative action on the TV screen.

Conclusion:
If you do not want video LAG on your video games, then do not buy a DLP TV. Because most games are NOT 720p. But? since the Xbox 2 era is nigh, you will only have to live with lag issues for about another couple of months, because ALL games will support 16:9 ratio (Widescreen) at 720p or higher! It will be great!

If you have any questions or comments feel free to post them.