Last night, Justine and I popped into Megamart for a look around. My main focus was for audio/visual equipment whereas Justine wanted to look at new couches.

We looked around for a while, and when we came to the TVs, I thought it might be a good idea to check out the DLP rear-projection units, since I haven’t really investigated them up close. There was a Samsung 61 inch unit which looked absolutely fantastic, however, as soon as Justine stood beside me she exclaimed there was “something funny” about the picture. I asked if she was seeing “rainbows”, and she emphatically told me that “yes”, that’s what she saw. On this particular unit I couldn’t spot it myself, but there was definitely something a bit funny about the unit to me as well — didn’t really seem like the “rainbow effect“. May have been environmental (i.e. ambient light, etc) playing tricks though.

I proceeded to explain the rainbow effect to Justine while she did her usual “pretend to listen about technical stuff” routine.

Next, we checked out the home theatre areas, and sat in the cheap home theatre seating which wasn’t really that comfortable. The DLP projectors looked quite good too, though I didn’t see anything “funny” this time around. Wondering if Justine had seen something because I’d asked her too, I got her to check out the “amazing” picture. Two seconds later she was asking me if it was another of “those screens”. Why yes it was.

As it turns out, I was able to replicate the “rainbow effect” myself by looking at the projector itself; the light was slightly hitting a black bar designed to hold the unit in place. Where it hit the bar, there was a white patch of light. I found that if I stared at the light, it looked fine. As soon as I moved my eyes quickly either way, I could see the effect.

Unfortunately, this means that the best large screen displays available at the moment — DLP — are not available to us (I could probably live with it, depending on the unit; some are more obvious than others. Justine though, would probably not like watching a DLP at this point). We’ll have to wait until the units are much faster and are “3-chip” models as opposed to the “1-chip” ones out now. Apparently these two things in conjunction with one another will all but eliminate the effect. Might be a few years yet though.

Still stuck with the 68cm for a while, then.

I was at Megamart earlier today exchanging an item I wrongfully purchased and since I was there, I thought I’d do the tech thing and have a bit of a look around.

After getting bored of playing with the gigantic G5 screens and the current range of iMacs and generic widescreen laptops, I headed over to the TVs.

This leads us to the title, why the heck do they set them up so badly? The LCD and plasma TVs had HD television inputs, of course, but the colours were all over the shop and half of the TVs don’t even display HD properly. I walked over to some of the rear-projection TVs since they’re more in my price range, and after fiddling with a couple (one of the Sony ones looked particularly nice after I spent a few minutes with it, I shall have to find out more about it) came to realise that not only was the input sent to these HD TVs not a HD input, but it wasn’t widescreen either.

However, the widescreen TVs had been set to “zoom” the image to fill the TV anyway. “Stuff this” I thought, so I went and changed half of them to “normal” or “pillar box” mode. If Megamart isn’t going to pipe proper input into TVs that support it (a few of them support 720p and 1080i, which is better than the majority of LCD/plasmas!) then they sure as hell shouldn’t be showing them like that — it looked awful.

At the desk exchanging my stuff, the five people standing around doing nothing were talking about digital cable TV and other such things. If this interests them, why can’t they even setup the TVs right? Of course, the five people busied themselves when I turned up for help. Eesh.