While CRT projection does suffer from a degree of lense flare now and then, I have not found that the image becomes unacceptably washed out with the presence of light during light scenes (my interior is treated with black cloth material to minimize reflections however).

However, it the new Kuro concept shows that we have finally achieved absolute black and is an entirely new breed. A significant step up even from existing Kuro models. Finally they have caught up to the CRT front projectors in terms of blacks. This can’t be good for SED.

http://gizmodo.com/341434/battlemodo-pioneer-super+black-kuro-concept-duels-best-tv-ever-and-wins

The main problems with CRT Projection are the sharpness, over-scan, and while the blacks do get black, they only do so when the entire image is dark, bright scenes bloom light everywhere, and tend to have a washed out look to them.

Text looks really muddy in comparison, making the term “film like” very accurate. All in all, I was happy with my CRT, and much happier with the Kuro.

If your looking to make the leep, you won’t be disappointed.

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Sure hasn’t been much news on the SED front. OLED while being extremely expensive right now, looks like it may be able to be manufactured at costs even lower then that of SED in time. I can’t imagine Plasma being able to compete price wise if production ever ramps up on either of these technologies.

http://cnbceb.com/technology-telecoms/can-canon/867/

It’s not so much that SD “looks worse” on a High definition set, so much as it is that HD sets are so much more true to the source, that you see all the flaws in the source that the older sets smudged and smeared and packed into a typically smaller screen area.

An example of this would be to watch an SD broadcast on a high quality HD set, then purposely blur your eyes.

Many people will perceive the picture to be of higher quality when doing this!!!

This is because when you purposely blur the picture using your eyes, artifacts will smear away, and your brain will try to “fill in” the missing detail.

HD being 6X higher resolution then SD also means that for SD to look clear, you would need to watch it on a screen 6X smaller, or stand that much further away from it. (20″ is 4X smaller then 40″)

If your one of the people that thinks SD looks worse on an HD set, try viewing it in PIP or split screen. This is obviously going to reduce the resolution of the picture, effectively reducing the quality of the image, but many of the people that think SD looks bad on HD will believe the picture quality improved doing this!

Another easy thing to do would be to take a high resolution (e.g. 10MP) digital camera picture, and view it at 100%, then zoom it back to 50% or 25% and compare how “sharp” the image appears.

The lower the resolution, the sharper its going to look even though that sounds counter intuitive.

And that is why so many people complain that SD looks bad on HD. (well that, and because many HD sets are of poor quality)

One last note: CRT (a Phosphor based display) is the standard on which material is and has been calibrated.

Plasma and SED are both Phosphor based displays unlike LCD.

That fact alone is going to typically allow CRT, Plasma, and SED to offer better color accuracy.

I think SED will be very similar to LCD and Plasma, when it comes to video/image material, because all these systems work also physically on a strict “per pixel” basis whereas cathode ray tubes just scan down the whole screen in a rather analogue fashion (although it has a fixed resolution, the “pixels” tend to blend into each other creating a softer image)

So a LCD or Plasma or SED won’t actually increase the quality of standard TV broadcast, just it’s size. But it is the better choice for HD or other digital TV material.