Vizio M550NV

There is one review at Costco.com for the similar M470MV. It's five stars.

I have just bought mine yesterday(7-11-10) from walmart for $1650. It was the vizio m550nv or the lg 55LE5400. the only difference was the vizio was 1mil:1 and the lg was 4mil:1, and of course the lg was $2030. So for the price i got the vizio, and after setting up everything, i have to say its pretty freaking amazing tv. of course this was a big upgrade from my sharp LC-52D64U, which died from surge (dont ask). The picture is amazing from the cable box, bluray movies look amazing, and my ps3 and xbox 360 runs flawless on it. I love the fact that it has built in wi-fi on it, and with my netflix account its so easy to use. The remote is bluetooth connect and looks like a cell phone with a slide out qwerty keyboard, its freaking cool. it has all the internet mumbo jumbo (yahoo, vudu, amazon, facebook, etc) so you can do alot on this tv. Picture is bright and crisp.

The only down side that i have on the tv is, there is little lag from the remote when your typing on it, and it takes longer then usual for the tv to power up.

other then that, this tv for the money, is a great buy and i love it! enjoy!

I just saw it at my local Costco in Cypress, CA on sale for 1599 (includes a $31 rebate). Also, on line for 100 more. Picture looked good to me but of course environment is not the best.

I just saw the Vizio M550NV TV at BJs and I thought it was the nicest TV there. It looked more like a regular LCD rather than LED lit but nonetheless I liked it the best overall.

Can someone give me a reason that I would find the picture on this TV better than the ones that are Tru Led with local dimming.

Basically I thought the TV showed the most detail with an extremely crisp picture. Probably not the highest contrast, certainly when compared to Tru Led, but I thought the picture was more realistic, with still an impressive black level and virtually no reflection.

In essence, I thought that the reflective screens of both the Samsung and Sharp LED TVs at BJs were not only annoying but also led to a more unrealistic picture in my opinion. (albeit probably the most eye catching).

I guess I cant understand all the fuss about Tru LED tvs. And I know that Vizio makes these Tru Led sets also.

I guess I would like to hear others opinion on this. Thanks!

I just picked one up yesterday. It is awesome. Actually I'm typing on it right now as it is hooked up to my computer as a monitor. Looks nice even with VGA but will pick up a small desktop with HDMI out. TV looks great ota.

Can you post some pics of it in action?

I don't have a good digital camera. Here is a photo of it displaying some over the air PBS given to me at 720p by our local station:



The picture is stunning in person. Blacks are black, whites are white, colors are true, and everything is very even. Motion is fluid.

Review from HomeTheaterReview.com. Link

Too bad they haven't seen the TV in person.

As a note the image quality is not at all similar to what you see in the store. It is exponentially better at home.

I tried getting out my tripod and shooting 1080 broadcasts, but my camera is definitely the limiting factor. 3 photos are attached below. This TV continues to amaze me.

This set does look very clear. What kinda camera do you have?

Nikon coolpix L15 Total PoS. It does OK outdoors, but indoors it is terrible. Very grainy.

I forgot to mention that the Kill a Watt meter was averaging 50-90 watts last night, which I thought was good for a 55" TV.

Adding another photo of using the set as a computer monitor by vga. It looks nice to me, I wonder how much better HDMI would be?

Here are the settings I am using with the TV in case anyone is interested.

Backlight 85 (controlled elsewhere)
Brightness 50
Contrast 50
Color 50
Tint 0
Sharpness 0
Color Temperature Normal
Smooth Motion Effect Off
Real Cinema Mode Off
Noise Reduction Off
Color Enhancement Off
Adaptive Luma Low
Film Mode Auto
Smart Dimming On
Ambient Light Sensor Low

Yeah, makes sense that a 1080P TV be fed a BluRay 1080P feed directly from the BD player to see just how good the picture can be at home.

I have been impressed with a variety of panels, some of them back-lit LED with local dimming and some CCFL. In the store the CCFL looked just as good as the full back-lit LED with local dimming.

While I am happy for you that you like your TV so much, I tend to look to professional reviews in which all the TVs are tested in exactly the same way. They use both test patterns, BluRay, and DVD to evaluate both HD performance and SD performance (which is of considerable interest to some people).

Personally, I look for a professional review first, and then go look at the TVs. Shame that there are so many models, from so many companies, in so many sizes with so many different combinations of features. While this variety is a plus, it makes it impossible to find professional reviews of all the available TVs.

I think that there are a lot of very good TVs out there and that sorting out which have the best picture quality with the fewest down sides can be daunting.

By the time the professional reviews are out and people have purchased the TVs, they are almost discontinued.

People would snap up Sony 55 XBR8's and Samsung 55B8500's at their close-out price. Shame that edge-lit is swamping back-lit.

Lastly, I hope that more people recognize Vizio as a top tier brand sooner rather than later.

I do look forward to seeing how blu ray will look on this tv.

I decided to shop at a local retailer with a 90 day return policy. So it wasn't too big of a gamble if the tv was no good. I read reviews and threads on other brands, but when I went shopping I found out there were very few large TVs available with matte screens. Basically it was a choice between the Vizios and Sonys. I thought the Vizio specs seemed better than the Sony ex500/ex700 that were available to me, so I went with the specs. I'm glad I did so far.

The USB ports are not active, but if I hook up my computer or a blu ray player with working USB ports, it is not a big deal to me.

My only other minor gripe is that the TV powers off on it's own if you don't do anything for probably 30-45 minutes. So I have to remember to push a button on the remote once in a while to keep it alive. As far as I can tell there is no setting to disable this power saving feature.

I had a friend who was shocked that I bought a Vizio since my budget was up to $5,000 He thought Vizio was a terrible brand. I challenge him or anyone else to produce a better picture than I have right now. I can't find flaws, and I am looking closely.

I spent some time using the internet apps. The Pandora radio is nice. I was surprised at how good the sound quality was. Not quite CD but at least FM stereo quality. I also enjoyed the Flickr slideshow. That would be good to use for parties. Also Facebook is handy and I was surprised at how much you can do with just the TV remote. Wikipedia was interesting also. Most of the other apps didn't appeal to me.

The TV is still looking great. I haven't purchased a blu ray player yet, but I did get my HDMI cables in from Monoprice, so I am ready.

Forgot to mention the TV is averaging 50-60 watts. I'm happy with that power consumption.

Yeah I wanna see how it looks on blu-ray. Prob gonna be awesome just by judging your other pics.

have you tried connecting your Vizio M550NV to the internet?

Yes, I spent some time using the internet apps. It was super easy to connect with the built in wireless.

The Pandora radio is nice. I was surprised at how good the sound quality was. Not quite CD but at least FM stereo quality. I also enjoyed the Flickr slideshow. That would be good to use for parties. Also Facebook is handy and I was surprised at how much you can do with just the TV remote. Wikipedia was interesting also. Most of the other apps didn't appeal to me.

Finally got to try blu ray, and WOW that was nice.

The blu ray was spitting out 24p with Avatar and I noticed some stuttering. So I turned on Smooth Motion Effect to Low and that cleared up 99% of the issue.

I'm guessing that turns the set from 60hz to 120hz?

Film mode is Auto and Ambient Light Sensor is Low. Everything else is off. Those settings seemed to work good.

What are other people using for settings?

Can you post more pics of it playin Blu Ray?

Yes, I'll try to get a photo or two uploaded soon.

I just got the m550nv at Costco for 1,599.

So far I have tested the HDMI Bluray 1080/24p with no problems and extremely clear picture, and it is amazing after some color adjustments on the bluray player and the TV. Out of the box settings for color and light DO NOT DO THIS TV JUSTICE. Also, don't enable the smoothing feature, it causes ripples and tears in fast moving scenes, looks essentially like a bunch of light horizontal lines. This isn't as bad in Bluray as it is with other sources, but it is definitely noticeable and the feature should just be left off because I noticed it on all low/medium/high settings.

The "ambient light sensing" feature is no good. It makes the picture too dark, and takes away your control of the backlight. Disable it and enjoy much higher contrast and richer color, and regain control of your backlight setting.

Lots of good picture controls. Standard controls + a full spectrum of color temp controls across the board. I am still curious as to what the Film Mode is and what that does.

XBOX360 HDMI tests were positive. I did see a light of vertical sync issues but I think thats mainly due to the xbox and the games, NOT the TV. After playing with the settings, and again, setting the XBOX to the correct color settings, I was able to make the games look brilliant.

It is hard to believe this is an edge lit w/o the local dimming. The blacks are really deep. I used Book of Eli as a test (lots of dark levels in that movie!!!) and it held up ok. You did see some of the blacks brighten on certain scenes as I understand is the case with a lot of TVs of this type. It did NOT divert my attention from the movie once I ignored it and it really wasn't that noticeable. Also keep in mind its 8ms response time.

For the price and the size, so far I am happy. I have 90 days to play with it because of Costco return policy so my reviews and analysis are totally unbiased, I can get my money back at anytime. If anyone has any advice on putting an edge lit to the test (because honestly that is my biggest concern, edge lit + no local dimming) please let me know.

Lates!

I agree about the ambient light sensor.

The smooth motion effect has benefits with motion and camera panning. I have kept it on low lately. But I do notice a bit of what you mentioned. I'm not sure if I am better off with or without it.

Glad to hear Xbox 360 looks good after some tweaking. I was wondering how the TV would perform with video games.

I showed the TV to 8 people this weekend and they were very impressed. I remain very happy every time I use it.

So I tried a couple of different games last night - I am having a really bad issue now that I didn't notice w/ the previous game I tried.

The games I am trying now look really bad - textures look bad, lots of jagged edges and more of those "vertical sync" issues (screen tearing etc) - I have done some research and read a lot about how 360 and ps3 consoles upscale most everything from 660 to 720/1080. A lot of the flaws are more noticeable when upscalling to 1080, especially if you haven't tweaked the TV colors and the Xbox settings appropriately. Some of the suggestions I read were to try EXPANDED mode, and to try running the Xbox and the TV source at 720p for games, since that removes the need to upscale.

I am new to 1080p TVs so any insight anyone can provide would be so helpful!