Do big-chain stores deliberately reduce/increase the image quality on TVs?

Irish_Tom

Irish_Tom

Irish_Tom

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18 Oct 2002
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Lo all,

I was walking around some high-street shops at the weekend and noticed a huge difference in picture quality between certain types of TV.

I'm aware that most of these places 'daisy chain' or split their outputs to drive all of the screens they have on display and that they generally don't set up the colours and contrast correctly. I know that to get a true indication of a screens capabilities you should ask for a '1-on-1' demo.

However, it seemed as though they had deliberately enhanced certain screens and given others a duff source. For instance, all the plasma's in one store looked shocking compared to the LCDs and the LCDs looked shocking compared to the LED Backlit panels.

I appreciate that there is supposed to be a difference in these tecs but it really did seem as though they were emphasising the LED Backlit screens compared to the others.

I was under the impression that plasmas were supposed to have amazing blacks (better than LCDs) but literally every screen in this place was grey rather than black and they all had horrendous ghosting/halo problems.

Is it just that I've been mistaken and plasmas are pap, or do you think the stores do it on purpose to make you buy the latest tech?

Panzer
 
depends where you go.
I work for the Indian place and tv's are fed off of 1 ariel and signal split, (think got ~100 tv's was bored 1 day so counted them all).
Reguarding the picture quality all that happens to a new tele is it's unboxed & put onto display so what you see is how it comes out from factary, we do no adjusting,
 
Currys really don't help themselves when they have TVs on display. Picture qual is awful..
 
I was in John Lewis one morning, for 9AM opening. Saw the girl go round turning all the TVs on and setting them to HDMI-1. Apart from one where she didn't seem to get that going to "AV1" (SCART) is no good - the HDMI cable is plugged into HDMI-1. So instead she set it to use it's built in Freeview tuner. There's all these TVs watching BBC-HD preview over HDMI-1 and then this one watching BBC News 24 on it's built in tuner. :( Can't remember what the model was but I remember noticing at the time that it was the best one there :(. Did it absolutely no justice at all.
 
When I worked for Comet I raised the issue of doing some basic calibration on the display TV's. It was rubbished but with good reason.

Your normal customer isn't going to be to clued up with regards to adjusting the various display settings. If they buy a TV and get home and the picture is noticeably worse than in the store they won't be too pleased and it would cause all manner of headaches for the store.

A more specialist store would probably have a differing approach but a big box store, it makes commercial sense not to.
 
Westyfield2 said:
Saw the girl
Click to expand...

Source of the problem detected :D

I definately think that stores should be more helpful and knwoledgable when it comes to telephones, but I understand that a company can't be just helpful and make money (E.g. HDMI cables that cos £££).

Still, they should be helping customers out, showing them the different televisions that suit their budget and also explaining that the out of box settings are not how a picture is supposed to look. If more of these larger high street companies did this then people might care a little more. But then again that is a big might as plenty of people think they know best or don't give a damn.
 
It's amusing to me, do these people not care about the picture quality?

Always used to moan about this when I worked in Comet back in the day, poor quality splitters give a false "bad image".

Having said that, if you are really interested in a TV then I'm sure they will hook up a blu-ray player or whatever to it to really test the image quality.
 
Often the demo TV's are just slapped on without any adjustment. LCD's generally look a bit brighter/sharper in a shop lit by strip lighting. But take the TV home and the plasma will often be a lot more "natural". There is such a thing as too sharp, too much contrast, and too bright. Plasma TV's have a balanced approach, which doesnt always work out best in tv store displays.

Interestingly Comet (gloucester branch) have the big Panasonic plasmas right at the back of the store, and have the lights dimmed, Im always stunned by the picture quality on the 60inch set they have on display. It helps that its on demo with a panasonic blu-ray player I guess :P.
 
Tesla said:
When I worked for Comet I raised the issue of doing some basic calibration on the display TV's. It was rubbished but with good reason.

Your normal customer isn't going to be to clued up with regards to adjusting the various display settings. If they buy a TV and get home and the picture is noticeably worse than in the store they won't be too pleased and it would cause all manner of headaches for the store.

A more specialist store would probably have a differing approach but a big box store, it makes commercial sense not to.
Click to expand...

That's perfectly understandable. Anyone with any interest in calibrating for the best picture will know this is the case anyway.

It's also why I always tell friends and family to buy based on expert reviews than what they see in the store.
 
And how do you know the picture is 'quality' if they are all set up as badly and ainaccurate as each other ;)
 
Good responses guys.

I can see the logic of Tesla's point - maybe plasmas just require more out-of-the-box tuning to get the best out of them or maybe, as Corasik says, the lighting in big stores isn't flattering for plasmas and suites LCDs/LED Backlit panels.

I must admit that I've only noticed this in the big-brand chain stores. If you go into a dedicated shop like a Sony centre of Panasonic shop, you do tend to get much better picture quality.

I like Seft's answer the most. :p

Panzer
 
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