ARCHIVED FORUM -- March 2012 to February 2022READ ONLY FORUM
This is the second Archived Forum which was active between 1st March 2012 and 23rd February 2022
Over the years we have discussed TVs on a number of occasions and the breadth of opinions at times revolves around the issue of paying a lot of money for a B&O TV whose technology has been at the point of release or soon to be surpassed by the likes of Smasung, Sony etc... B&O rightly has to wait for new technology to stabilise before it invests it meagre R&D budet on a new TV with new screen or software technology. What has shone through all our debates was the love and affection for the old Avant. CRT techonolgy had gone as far as it could and that was the ideal environment for B&O to step in and do TV the way it should be done and delivered TV in the marvelous wrap of B&O. IMHO there has been no finer CRT TV that the B&o Avant. Over the last decade it has been: DVD to Blu-ray from plasma to HD to 3d , LCD to LED, back to edge to local dimming, blu-ray to UHD, OLED with retina screens lurking in teh background.... I buy a B&O TVs for the form, the sound, the movements, the Gestalt they call it. Will we ever see the stabilisation of flat screen or is this a perpetual journey of new formats, codecs, new screens that is doomed to continue until we have holographic TVs or cortical stimulators that project the image into your visual cortex...
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Present: BL90, Core, BL6000, CD7000, Beogram 7000, Essence Remote.
Past: BL1, BL2, BL8000, BS9000, BL5, BC2, BS5, BV5, BV4-50, Beosystem 3, BL3, DVD1, Beoremote 4, Moment.
I think the future lies with something like Sony 4k ultra short throw projector connected wireless with wisa but at higher bandwith for 4k.
Agree. If you want to get out of this technological war take a BV7 with bluray, attacks a fullhd projector and you're ok for years. When you have 2 meters of the screen you do not need another.
I suspect it will just keep developing, stall for a bit whilst the content catches up (like 4k) and then move forward, same as it always has. There will always be something new around the corner.
I think the future lies not in what we watch TV on but how we watch it - ipads, phones etc maybe even glasses in the future.
The one thing that hasn't moved forward though is the content. In the UK we have never ending reality shows and generally dumbed down television with a never ending stream of celebrities. Until that changes then I don't see the point in paying a licence fee and so I just watch Apple TV and stream movies from Netflix and Lovefilm. I think there will be massive changes now that we have high speed broadband and streaming capabilities and at some point the traditional TV station with it's programming will make way for TV on demand. That, imho, will be TV revolution rather than the technology we view it on.
Another point may well be that the way in which some programmes/films are presented - some films are too dark, some too much colour and the modern thing of over exposure in adverts so that everything looks almost white is really annoying. Back in the day the BBC used to spend vast amounts of money on monitors so that all the programmes had the same colour, contrast and brightness - now it changes all the time.
BTW - agree with the comments on the Avant CRT and BV3 - all the Beovisions I have had, have had superb pictures.
I still use an Avant CRT and BV3 and the picture is still superb! The sound is also great!
Peter
I suspect it will be a long time, if ever, before it settles down, mainly because the big manufacturers need turnover, they need you to become dissatisfied with your set so you will buy another one. Their entire business model is not based on selling only replacement sets to people, or to new buyers of a bigger screen, they need to churn the market constantly. And they do this by inventing something new, and marketing it as a must have, even if it isn't better or even as good as what it replaces, just easier and cheaper for them to make. As in, crappy LCD panels instead of plasma.
The audio side tries to do this with HD audio files, with so far limited success. It seems the TV makers are better at convincing people what they must have is what's new.
Jeff
I'm afraid I'm recovering from the BeoVirus.
Couldn't agree more. Cheers, Kai
There's a series on the BBC right now called "The Men Who Make Us Spend" and this would sort of answer your question about when TV standards will ever stabilise. They won't.
The conspiracy theories presented by this TV programme effectively imply that modern marketing is about constantly generating buzz about 'future products' to entice us to keep upgrading. Manufacturers don't want people to sit with their TV for ten years. They want people to upgrade every couple or so years, so keep coming up with new standards/ideas/plans to get people to upgrade.
I remember about ten years ago, Adobe used to make their once-a-year pilgrimage to us technology publishers to announce the latest version of Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver etc. Each one of these applications had 10 - and only 10 - key new features each year.
Adobe's PR lady admitted once that they sat down as a group and often planned these 10 features often two or three years in advance. If they came up with too many ideas, they simply held them off for year, so they didn't give their end users too many new features, too soon. They had to get them to upgrade to the new version every year, didn't they? :) So, they put a ceiling on new features and pushed back new ideas until next years update.
It's the same with TV technology. Whilst we're buying Avant's that might not even play 120Hz 4K which may or may not happen, there's talk about 8K, OLED, 5G streaming and much more.
Re: Adobe. Not sure thats at all how we ran development. But definitely a good story and makes the point. We were definitely never contrived around what we'd put in a product or not, or limiting anything - it was more a matter of what we could get delivered reliably within the launch timeframe.
OLED is now the best technology and would be the future in B&O tvs.
I feel sad knowing that a good RF AVANT DVD 32 go's for +-350€. A superb and for me the best CRT TV i ever had.
The AV9000. 4:3. Not exactly today's TV anymore. But everytime i see one, i melt like a'n ice-creme.I want to save them all. Pure Art.
And knowing that that marvelis BV5 wil be sold at B&O dealers that i know for about 800€ included delivery and warranty.
What is a good deal these days??
Borjal84: OLED is now the best technology and would be the future in B&O tvs.
Unfortunately OLED has some potentially fatal flaws that have yet to be fully solved...lifetime of the blue LED for one, yield in large panel sizes for another. Perhaps solvable, perhaps not. Certainly yield improved markedly for plasmas over the life of the technology, will it improve rapidly enough for OLED to keep the manufacturers from dropping the technology? Don't know. Then there's the blue LED, differences between the Samsung and LG design approaches, Samsung uses an active OLED for blue, red, and green, whereas LG uses white OLEDs with a color overlay that is supposed to avoid the issue. Not sure what the visual performance trade off might be as I've not had a chance to extensively look at these kind of panels yet.
The problem from us consumers viewpoint is this: Will OLED drop in price and improve in performance fast enough to survive, since it's obvious from the number of crappy LCD sets sold that the vast majority of the market cares not a whit about true video performance? Remember, back in the day it was impossible to sell a B&O Avant next to a conventional mass market tube on the floor of non-dedicated stores over here anyway, they were too accurately calibrated, and didn't gouge your eyes out. Same with Plasma, a mature, superior technology to LCD, which is essentially disappearing because the hoi polloi don't appreciate the difference, see good B&O tubes reference above.
There is no doubt that OLED is the future panel technology and will stay in that position for a number of years. They are power efficient, have perfect blacks, good color and so on. Sure the OLED technology will mature over the years in every way. But the start-of-life standard of OLED displays are still far superior to any other panel technology.
4K is also more or less a given. It wont be long before every display is 4K, even the smaller ones.
What you should be worried about however is the standards for playback and the way we watch TV. This is an area that evolves way faster than the display technology. There are numerous brands competing against each other, all wanting to promote their own solutions.
Streaming is quickly becoming a large player in the global marked. But the formats are ever changing.
In 2-3 years when OLED is matured and ready available for everyone to buy, then you wont see much change in picture quality.
So I would expect that a B&O OLED TV is announced in a few years, and that it will be a DISPLAY that would last for quite some time. And I emphasize DISPLAY, because in time you will need to buy external boxes to stay on top of the game. Tuner-standards will evolve (DVB-C2 etc.), Streaming codecs will change (MPEG4 to HVEC), the preferred streaming companies will change (Netflix, HBO, Spotify etc.).
You will never be able to buy a TV that lasts for 10-15 years, without the need to upgrade anything. But a least with the introduction of OLED, the most expensive part to upgrade, the display, will be more or less future proof.
Beovision Eclipse gen2 (GX) w/ floorstand, Beolab 14.2, 4 speaker Shape and ATV4/Chromecast.
Beoplay A9mk4 GVA, Beosound 1 GVA, H2, H3, H8, E6, Beoplay EQ
mawheele: Re: Adobe. Not sure thats at all how we ran development.
Re: Adobe. Not sure thats at all how we ran development.
Truth be told, it was probably Macromedia's PR, before the Adobe purchase. They were demonstrating Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash etc. It would have been circa 2003, so almost certainly Macromedia. In those days, I used to attend the Macromedia press launches, purely to blag a copy.
But, yes, she was almost proud to tell us they thought of 'future new features' two or three years in advance and held them back to encourage yearly upgrades.