Right after I posted, I began to realize that I had no idea if there were going to be other issues just based on a Japan vs. Rest of the World issue. Japan uses NTSC for standard TV, which made purchasing VHS tapes a snap back in the day, but the introduction of Region with the DVD format has kept me from buying any Japanese DVDs; which is strange since I own a player for each.
So one thing you brought up is the HD thing; maybe the LCD TVs are so expensive because they support progressive scan; I don't know that they do, but it would make a bit of sense. Unfortunately the demos they show on them are rarely HD; they run HD demos on their large screen TVs and such, but not the Sharp AQUOS line, which is the most commonly available LCD TV here, and typically one of the first to drop in price.
Do HDTVs use firewire for signal carriage? That is wild! One thing about FireWire, which apparently is an Apple designation, is that Japanese manufacturers do not want to acknowledge the name and give mindshare to the concept. Sony goes by iLink, and everyone else uses the IEEE designation, which is purely political and unnecessarily obfuscating. However I will keep the HDMI or DVI in mind when looking at any future purchases.
Here is a giant exposure of my ignorance: If the AQUOS are capable of a higher resolution signal than they are being displayed at, that would explain why the pictures look crappy -- they're being scaled up to fill the picture. Despite the fact that I can't stand looking at text on monitors that aren't running their best-native-resolution, it hadn't dawned on me that the same would be true for LCD screened TVs.
Can PC monitors display HDTV, or is that simply a question of the source they are displaying from and the refresh rate of whatever monitor it is using? Does the playback device also factor in? (Here I am associating with VLC, which gives me dick-refresh rates on my 2.4GHz machine at home, and slideshow-like viewing on my iBook.)
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Right after I posted, I began to realize that I had no idea if there were going to be other issues just based on a Japan vs. Rest of the World issue. Japan uses NTSC for standard TV, which made purchasing VHS tapes a snap back in the day, but the introduction of Region with the DVD format has kept me from buying any Japanese DVDs; which is strange since I own a player for each.
So one thing you brought up is the HD thing; maybe the LCD TVs are so expensive because they support progressive scan; I don't know that they do, but it would make a bit of sense. Unfortunately the demos they show on them are rarely HD; they run HD demos on their large screen TVs and such, but not the Sharp AQUOS line, which is the most commonly available LCD TV here, and typically one of the first to drop in price.
Do HDTVs use firewire for signal carriage? That is wild! One thing about FireWire, which apparently is an Apple designation, is that Japanese manufacturers do not want to acknowledge the name and give mindshare to the concept. Sony goes by iLink, and everyone else uses the IEEE designation, which is purely political and unnecessarily obfuscating. However I will keep the HDMI or DVI in mind when looking at any future purchases.
Here is a giant exposure of my ignorance:
If the AQUOS are capable of a higher resolution signal than they are being displayed at, that would explain why the pictures look crappy -- they're being scaled up to fill the picture. Despite the fact that I can't stand looking at text on monitors that aren't running their best-native-resolution, it hadn't dawned on me that the same would be true for LCD screened TVs.
Can PC monitors display HDTV, or is that simply a question of the source they are displaying from and the refresh rate of whatever monitor it is using? Does the playback device also factor in? (Here I am associating with VLC, which gives me dick-refresh rates on my 2.4GHz machine at home, and slideshow-like viewing on my iBook.)