Test Bench for Web Mitsubishi WD-62827 62-inch DLP HDTV by Philip Ryan

Color temperature (Natural picture and Low color-temperature presets before/after calibration) Low window (20-IRE): 6,077/6,493 K High window (80-IRE): 6,198/6,504 K Brightness (100-IRE window before/after calibration): 113.6/72.9 ftL

Mitsubishi's WD-62827 certainly benefited from service-menu calibration. The color temperature was noticeably warm out of the box. After calibration, I was able to bring it within 100 K of the 6,500-K standard for almost the entire grayscale. Overall grayscale linearity improved from ±347 K before calibration to ±90 K afterwards (Calibration needs to be performed by a qualified technician, so discuss it with your dealer before purchase, or contact the Imaging Science Foundation at imagingscience.com or 561-997-9073.)

Before calibration, the TV measured a bright 113.6 ftL. After calibration, it measured a tamer 79.9 ftL in the Natural picture mode - still very bright for a dark viewing room. Uniformity was good, with only minor hotspotting. If you plan to use the component-video inputs for most of your viewing, note that the TV doesn't pass below-black picture information through these inputs. This may make it harder to set black level (that is, brightness) yourself using a test DVD such as Sound & Vision Home Theater Tune-Up or Digital Video Essentials.

A slight bowing of lines toward the corners was visible on the left and right sides of geometry test patterns but not with normal programming. Out of the box, the picture had a very minor shift to the right and top of the screen. This shift was easily corrected in the service menu. Overscan measured 2.5%, about average.

Color decoding wasn't very accurate prior to calibration. I measured a +15% red error and -10% green error in the Natural mode with the Avia DVD's color-decoding-error test pattern. I was able to compensate for this using the TV's Perfect Picture feature, which lets you individually adjust the red, green, and blue primary colors as well as the cyan, magenta, and yellow secondary colors. Adjusting for more natural reds had a noticeable impact on secondary colors, however, preventing me from fully taming the red push. The result wasn't as bad as the initial errors but still not dead-on.

The WD-62827 was unable to fully display all the detail in the 1080i multiburst test pattern from our Sencore VP403 signal generator. The finest grouping of lines in the pattern merged completely into a single gray bar. Still, I couldn't see any appreciable softness in normal program material compared with TVs that can fully resolve this pattern. Plus, the TV did a perfect job with 720p and lower-resolution multiburst patterns, something not always seen with 1080p sets, which prefer 1080i signals because they require a less complex conversion to fill the screen.