steve359 wrote:
Others give up on TVs as a presentation medium. The answer is simple enough, if you pay attention to the simple figure of "pixels per inch". On a 22 in display that is 1920x1080, the pixls are tiny and blends into a better picture. On a 60 in TV that is 190x1080 the pixels will be larger, and people will need to be further away for the pixels to blend nicely, if it ever converges into a good picture.
While that is a reasonable statement when comparing a TV to a computer monitor of the same size, HDTVs should be adequate to superior for most presentation applications. The reason is that historically, most presentation equipment has been much lower resolution than an HDTV. Your common video projector, which today might be 1600x1200 (lower than an HDTV) if you're lucky, used to be 1024x768 (a lot lower than an HDTV), and for many years before that 800x600 or 640x480 (ridiculously lower than an HDTV). Businesspeople projected these low resolutions across screens in boardrooms and even entire conference halls, and considered them acceptable.
The 1920x1080 resolution of an HDTV is much, much higher than the historical standard expectation for business presentations, and in addition, anyone who needs more than 1920x1080 pixels for, as the original post specified, "Keynote, PowerPoint, or video" presentations has rare and special requirements. A good 60" TV will work great.
steve359 wrote:
My advice is to take your MBP, your intended adapter, intended cable, and go to Best Buy or Wal-Mart and plan on plugging into several TVs. The mixed results of others suggest that there is no single good TV brand or class of LCD display.
This is great advice, you have to try it on different actual TVs if possible. Although with most TVs it should not be much of a problem.
Be aware that to get the image to fit the screen properly, it may be necessary to adjust both the settings (such as Overscan) in the Displays preference on your Mac, as well as the screen scaling options on the TV remote itself. So don't dismiss a TV just because the picture is wrong, until you've made sure it's not because you simply missed a setting in those two places. However, if you find a TV where the picture looks great right away, that unit would obviously be easier to set up.
