New tv.

[tpugmire]

My Mom is moving to a new, smaller place, and has no room for her flat screen plasma tv, so she said I could have it for free. Now, I've heard that plasma tv's are no good for gaming, but I'm not sure why. I've owned a lot of tv's over the years, but they have all been sd crt's, so I have no idea what I'm in for. Anyone care to fill me in?

[soera]

If I remember right, Plasmas have a bad burn in factor and a lot of the newer flatscreen style TVs dont work with stuff like zappers and what not. Plus the more HD the TV is, the actual worse it looks with the old school pixel levels.

[pceslayer]

Old plasmas had latency and image retention issues.

Plasmas don't suffer from actual burn in like a crt, however they are more prone to image retention than LCD. Usually can be remedied by turning the picture and brightness down a few notches. Plasmas have a better color gamut and superior pixel response time compared to LCD. Latency is a thing of the past as well for newer models.

Zappers only work on CRTs because of how they are designed. You can however buy light guns that do work on LCD/plasma/dlp, but not for classic gaming(unless pc emulation).

Plasma >LCD any day!

What's the model #??

[tpugmire]

I have no idea what the model is, or even what brand for that matter. I won't be able to even take a look until I go to pick it up from her next month. She said its around 10 years old, whatever that is worth. I know light guns won't work on it, and that's fine. I don't really plan to hook any old systems to it anyway.

[teck]

I solved my light gun issues by picking up a decent looking older tube at Goodwill for a dollar....  I'm not sure if it is a nationwide policy, but all Goodwill stores in Arizona sell any Tube TV for only one dollar....  Makes a great backup for older console gaming for a price point that is moot....

[stethebubble]

If I remember right, Plasmas have a bad burn in factor and a lot of the newer flatscreen style TVs dont work with stuff like zappers and what not. Plus the more HD the TV is, the actual worse it looks with the old school pixel levels.

i wouldnt be too worried with burn in. thats only really an issue for the first few hundred hours.

[pceslayer]

10 years old ay... Expect it to be a EDTV or an HDTV with some funky native resolution.

It'll probably support 480p and 720p, but will scale them to whatever its native res is.

[tpugmire]

I went and picked up the TV this past weekend and got a better look at it. It's a Sony Wega ke50xs910. I haven't hooked it up yet, I still need to find a stand big enough for it. If I remember correctly, it has 1 RF input, 3 composite/s-video inputs, 2 component inputs, and 1 DVI input. No HDMI though.

[pceslayer]

here is the manual

http://store.sony.com/wcsstore/SonyStyleStorefrontAssetStore/pdf/warranty/ae6f0ad034cd6c1111cda5e1249739ca4885977f.pdf

Native resolution is 1280x768 and supports the following

480i
480p
720p
1080i

and probably 576p since it supports 1080i

[darko]

I went and picked up the TV this past weekend and got a better look at it. It's a Sony Wega ke50xs910. I haven't hooked it up yet, I still need to find a stand big enough for it. If I remember correctly, it has 1 RF input, 3 composite/s-video inputs, 2 component inputs, and 1 DVI input. No HDMI though.

I would venture to guess that a set that old is extremely unlikely to suffer serious image retention if it hasn't already. You could run into lag issues - but I'm not familiar with Sony Plasma sets. You just have to use common sense when running older systems on a plasma. I've had a sega CD hooked up to the plasma in my game room for years and haven't ever run into any problems. The funny thing is...the only IR I've run into was on Dark Souls. I played over 100 hours of the game (and that's the only thing that the TV was used for) in about a week so...yeah...you could kinda see the hub for a few weeks after I quit playing it.