LCD TV Reviews

Real-World Performance
Normally, I don't comment on the TV's sound quality until the end of this section, but I'll start with the ISP in this case. It didn't sound all that great in Grayscale Studio's large room (32' x 22' x 11') because the walls were so far away.

When I moved the set into the smaller room (18' x 13' x 8'), the sound improved immensely. I centered the TV on the 13-foot wall, and after entering the room's dimensions and seating distance, I played with the Custom controls to see how they affected the sense of surround. Sure enough, the pink-noise test tones generated by the TV for each channel seemed to be coming at me from roughly the correct directions, and I could move them around a bit, which was very cool.

Of course, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, so I played some clips from M:i:III, which has lots of surround action. Racing cars and flying bullets were relatively convincing in their placement within the surround soundfield, and dialog intelligibility was excellent. Overall, it was still not nearly as good as a real surround system, but the ISP is far better than the typical TV sound as long as it's in a small enough room to reflect the beams from the walls.

Moving on to the visual evaluation, frame interpolation did improve motion detail in Cars on Blu-ray. There were virtually no smudging artifacts in the array of blue lights behind Lightning McQueen as he is profiled during the Piston Cup race, although the color of those lights was a little too deep, almost violet.

Star Wars VI on DVD is another of my favorite test discs for frame interpolation, and again, the Mitsubishi showed no signs of artifacts in the first view of the Death Star from Darth Vader's shuttle cockpit or in the fine vertical lines in the landing bay. The black of space was not all that deep despite the relatively low black level measurement, and the differentiation in Vader's black costume was mediocre, though the shadow detail in the shuttle cockpit was surprisingly good.

Overall detail was not bad from the Denon DVD player set to 480p and the TV's sharpness set to 13, but it was better when upconverted in the player and the sharpness set to 0. Colors were okay, but skin tones still looked too red.

Tom Norton recently showed me how good Hidalgo looks on Blu-ray, so it's now part of my set of reference discs. Detail in the desert landscapes and intricate Arabic textiles was good, but the color wasn't quite right—the blue sky was too deep and skin tones were too red.

Another great reference Blu-ray is The Chronicles of Narnia. Shadow detail in Tumnus' home was very good, as was the detail in the showy landscapes and Aslan's hair. However, the green grass in Aslan's encampment was a bit neon, and skin tones were again slightly ruddy.

To verify these perceptions, I put the Mitsubishi next to the LG 50PG60 plasma, whose colors I know to be quite good. Using an HDMI splitter to feed the same signal to both sets, the difference was clear—in Hidalgo, the sky was deeper blue, almost violet, and skin tones were redder on the 52149. The LG simply looked more natural.