Old consoles with Projection HDTV?

[RetroRich]

i have one of those panasonic 720p projection tv's. 47 inches, and it is oe of those huge crt looking tv's. Do these type of HDTV's output old consoles well, or would it still be better to get a normal sdtv crt?

[stargate]

i have one of those panasonic 720p projection tv's. 47 inches, and it is oe of those huge crt looking tv's. Do these type of HDTV's output old consoles well, or would it still be better to get a normal sdtv crt?

They will look better on a standard CRT television which you can find dirt cheap on Craigslist.

[Orion Pimpdaddy]

Depending on the refresh rate, you may not be able to play light gun games.

[Jim]

Do yourself a favour and pick up an old CRT for $15. I suffered through playing Genesis on my Samsung 32" LCD for a long while. Looked like crap and nearly made my eyes bleed. These old systems were designed to play in standard def.

[NayusDante]

If it's rear-projection, you'll probably get burn-in. If you correct the aspect ratio to 4:3, the sidebars and the center image will burn in at different rates.

Depending on how it interprets the signal, it could look nice, or it could look terrible (my parents had a big Hitachi rear-projection and NES looked terrible). Regardless, the burn-in problem means that it won't look great for long.

Given recent trends in TV production, I'm guessing your unit is a few years old now, which means it might need maintenance, cleaning, bulb replacement...

DLPs don't have this problem, so the only issue with those is the signal delay. If your TV is a DLP and not a rear-projection model, it might actually be pretty good. However, these have moving parts and may need to be serviced.

Anything that doesn't have HDMI output (barring the early 360s) was really designed to output to a CRT, so that's where you'll see the BEST picture. Alternate technologies of the CRT era like plasma and rear-projection are really designed first for movies and television, where the image does not remain static for long. Given that many consoles outputted at 30fps progressively, it's displaying the same image twice before the next frame and (correct me if I'm wrong) doubling the rate of burn-in.

[CRTGAMER]

i have one of those panasonic 720p projection tv's. 47 inches, and it is oe of those huge crt looking tv's. Do these type of HDTV's output old consoles well, or would it still be better to get a normal sdtv crt?

I don't care for projection TVs because of the dim image when viewed from the sides. However projection do seem better in handling non HD screens then LCDs. So perhaps your Retro Consoles will look fine. I play a variety of consoles from Atari to NES to Dreamcast to PS2. All look great on my HD 4:3 CRT, you might get lucky on yours.

[Leo_A]

Depending on the refresh rate, you may not be able to play light gun games.

Has nothing to do with refresh rate in this instance. Light gun games 100% won't work on that set, even if it has a 60Hz refresh rate or whatever it is that was typical in years gone by. They're only compatible with standard definition CRT's and weren't designed to accomodate a HD set. The hardware and the programmers never anticipated someone using a HD CRT. They're designed for 480i CRT's and will only work with 480i CRT's.

And with the nature of projection technology, I wouldn't be surprised if light guns wouldn't even work on an older 480i projection set.