Chicks Dig Nerds, Right?

My happy place

After my last post, I received several e-mails asking about my home theater equipment. I thought I’d answer them here in one shot rather than writing the same e-mail several times. My TV is a Pioneer PRO-1140HD plasma. DVD playback comes in the form of a Marantz DV4001 upconverting DVD player. I also have an XBox 360 Elite and a Sony Playstation2. It’s all hooked up via HDMI (except the PS2, which is connected directly to the TV via component, with a SPDIF audio cable running to the receiver), running through a Harman/Kardon AVR-347 receiver. For speakers, I have Klipsch Quintet III surround sound, with a Klipsch Synergy Sub-10 10″ subwoofer. The entertainment center is cherry wood with a smoked glass (black) top and door windows. The center channel drawer has a black mesh window to let sound through while concealing the speaker.

A lot of people ask me why I went plasma over LCD for my monitor. The answer is, in short, quality. LCDs have come a long way in the last year or so, but they haven’t surpassed plasma technology yet. This is most apparent in black levels, color gamut and motion smear. Motion smear is mostly a fixed issue with the release of 120Hz refresh LCDs (no more 3:2 pulldown!), and LCD color gamut is getting better all the time, but they’re still issues now. Black levels may get better, or they may not, but at current they suck.

This isn’t to say plasma doesn’t have down sides, but I find those down sides to be much easier to deal with, and easily fixed for the most part. Primarily, plasmas aren’t as bright as LCDs (emitting around 300 nits peak output, versus LCDs being in the 400 - 500 nits peak output range now). This means that plasmas, while being awesome at dark colors, don’t have really bright brights. This problem is easily compensated for with the right lighting. The other big down side to plasma is the coarse pixel pitch. Of course, this is only noticeable on smaller screens, and due to the fact that LCDs are cheaper to produce, they’re pretty entrenched in the sub-40″ market. Translation: You really can’t find a plasma TV small enough that the coarse pixel pitch is an issue. The other side of LCDs being cheaper to produce is that they get more sales, and more research, so they evolve faster.

When all is said and done, however, one would be incredibly hard pressed to convince me to buy an LCD over plasma at this point. I’ll definitely be paying attention to upcoming generations of LCD technology, however.