LCD TV Reviews

Real-World Performance
Stealth on Blu-ray is a very sharp transfer with a rich color palette, making it a great demo disc. As expected from the test material discussed earlier, fast motion—of which there is a lot in this movie—was not as sharp as I've seen on other sets, especially well-done 120Hz models. But detail in stationary and slow shots was great.

Other areas of picture performance, including blacks, shadow detail, and color, were all excellent. But whites looked a bit crushed in certain scenes, such as the brightly lit bar before the pilots ship out—their white uniforms looked a little flat.

To check the white crush a bit more, I played Antarctica Dreaming on Blu-ray. Sure enough, the whites of icebergs looked slightly flat, though the overcast sky looked fine. The problem only seemed to appear with the whitest of whites, and even then, it was not terrible.

Colors were gorgeous on the Pearl Harbor Blu-ray disc, and shadow detail in the night scenes was very nice. Again, fast motion lost a significant amount of detail, but stationary and slow shots were razor-sharp.

Turning to DVD, the riotous onstage colors of Topsy-Turvy, a Gilbert and Sullivan biopic, were faithfully rendered, as were the more mundane "real-life" colors, such as skin tones. Detail was as good as can be expected from DVD, but not as sharp as a high-def source, and the loss of detail in moving objects was less obvious as a result.

The set's audio performance was not so great. Dialog generally sounded very closed in and unclear, and there wasn't much in the way of bass. This TV would be well served by adding an outboard sound system.