Vizio E701i-A3 Owners Thread - Page 35

I had my set freeze on a black screen. Unplugged it, then plugged it back in. Works fine, but i hope it isnt a sign. Up until now ive had no electronic issues. Just the color uniformity issue on lef and right side of screen as well as the vertical offcenter band.

Opinions please ...

I was planning to buy the new 2013 Panasonic TC-P60ST60 plasma (and even have one on pre-order). However, my room has two large sliders on the south wall and the kitchen with it's large window on the north wall. There are times (different at different times of the year) where there's a lot of bright sun on the east wall where the TV will be.

I then discovered this 70" Vizio and have been told that the LCD will be more forgiving to the extra light than the plasma would be. So ... given that both TV's are basically the same price, I'd be giving up the plasma's "better PQ", the 3D and the "newest technology". But with the Vizio, I gain the brightness to offset the room light and a noticeably larger image. Oh ... and I can get the Vizio now vs waiting for the Panasonic to become available.

I'm now leading towards the Vizio. Am I missing anything?

Thank you for any thoughts any of you would care to share.

Pretty much the same choice I had. I bought the Vizio and am more than happy with it. Using the settings here in this thread should allow you to fine tune the picture to your liking. I've had mine for over a month and it's on for about 10 hours a day. I sit about 18ft back from the TV. The weakest point about the Vizio, and all LCD TV's is off axis viewing. The picture fades as you move very far from center. That is one of the big strong points with plasma. The 70" screen is something you will never get tired of and will garner wows from anybody that sees it. The picture settings I have settled on allows for a stunning picture and blu-rays are fantastic. Obviously I watch a lot of TV and consider myself very picky. I saw it advertised this week for under $1600. I bought a 3yr extended warranty for $99 which starts after the 1 year factory warranty expires. As great as the picture is on the Panasonic plasma it does have it's draw backs. Very reflective screen and the chance of image retention (see the review in the current issue of Sound & Vision Magazine).

Thank you very much for your thoughts Andy!!

The room brightness (lots of windows) was the main reason why we went with LED-LCD. Also, chose this specific Vizio set for it's "anti-glare" screen.

@imstaceyj,

Thank you very much for your input! I do believe I'm going to stop by BB on my way home tonight.

Okay .... so I got the email from Costco regarding the 3 additional years of warranty through Square Trade for $99.

I see that several of you here have purchased this or, at least, commented on it.

My question is ..... have any of you actually tried to use this warranty? Or do you know someone who has tried to use it? In general, I do not buy any sort of extended warranties because it's usually just throwing money away. It always seems next to impossible to get these companies to cooperate and come though when you try to ac t on a warranty.

They have a very good reputation and reviews are plentiful. Also, if it's backed by Costco I have 100% comfort level in them. I normally do not recommend extended warranties either, however, Vizio has a bit of a poor reliability rep (parts availabilty etc.), especially with how they have handled warranty claims in the past. This warranty is a in home warranty and includes replacing up to what you paid for the TV. Square Trade contracts with local TV repair company's to do the work.

Very unlikely that a TV needs repair in last three years after initial two years. If it does usually it happens early on. There is a reason they do not offer 10 years extended. But if it makes you feel better pay that $100. If bought from costco two years seems enough.
I have never heard of bad warranty service from Visio in broad sense either. It is in par with others.

I can confirm that the e701i-A3 can play content from an NTFS formatted USB hard drive. My drive is unpowered (i.e. powered via USB), a Seagate Go Flex portable 500 gb drive. I was able to play 1080p x264 encoded video. Smooth playback.

That's cool. I hadn't really considered that as something I really want/need since I've got a SageTV server and would normally play such files from there. But, given this ability ... how does the audio work? Does the TV send it to the receiver/pre-processor via the HDMI ARC or what?

Hello all, I have been browsing this thread for a long time and finally took the plunge and purchased the Vizio E701i-A3 TV. I thought I would share my experience thus far and some pictures as well. When I went to purchase it from Walmart online, the price had dropped to $1598 over night from $1698. I chose site to store, but it was not available the same day as they promised. After some haggling with Walmart.com they agreed to knock $50 off of the warranty, so I added a 3 yr. extended warranty for $100. All in all not a bad purchase price. I was eyeballing my mirrors all the way home on the drive. This thing was like a billboard saying follow me home and steal me. I was getting looks of curiosity all throughout the journey. Loving the TV, so far no issues at all. After the pictures I will include my settings.

I chose to wall mount this beast. I picked up a Sanus low profile mount while at Walmart and thought that it might stick out to far from the wall, but it worked out really well, it is just right for my taste. One thing to keep in mind if you buy this tv and choose to wall mount it, don't forget to remove the bracket the stand attaches to (you will see it in a few pictures), It was driving me crazy, but I was able to remove it with a stubby screwdriver without taking the tv off its mount. I just had to pull the cords to swing it away from the wall a few inches.

Picture quality is good, not a Samsung by any stretch of the imagination, but after a few days your eyes will adjust to the picture and the slight grayness will cease to be an issue. I have a wall of 5 6' windows facing the TV and 2 more plus an all glass front door to the left of the TV and the picture is fine in daylight with my settings. Off angle viewing starts to wash out at about 45 degrees off center, but is still completely viewable, just not as bright/colorful as a center on view.

I calibrated this with the Disney WOW Bluray disc using movie mode and the cnet settings as a starting point. My Normal TV/Netflix,Hulu viewing settings (2 different ones) are much different, set to a level my family was comfortable with. I reserved my WOW settings for watching Bluray in a dark room. Overall I am impressed with the quality of picture from such a massive tv at such a reasonable price. There is one dead sub pixel (not pixel) on the upper right screen, only viewable up close if you look for it. Not bad to have only one dead one considering there are over 6 million sub pixels on the screen.

I would definitely recommend this TV to anyone who has the space. It is massive though so be sure to measure beforehand, pictures don't show an accurate perspective of how big it really is. For reference, the wall behind the TV is 12' and the stand below is 46".

As far as sound, I was leaning toward adding the Yamaha YSP-3300 as I like a simple solution and one that ofers HDMI with ARC, but it is out of my budget at the moment so I am using the tv speakers. They work fine, but are what you would expect, crappy sound in a thin tv.

I tried using the Media feature and found I could browse pictures on my iPad Mini and iPhone 5 by installing the app store app iMediaShare. The TV recognized my camera roll right away and I could browse through pictures or set it for slide show. Videos and other content would not work. An Apple TV would be a great addition for this. Angry Birds at 70" would be awesome.

Settings to follow after the pictures.













Here are the settings, First for Bluray(WOW calibrated), next for regular cable tv, lastly for internet apps such as hulu and netflix.

For Bluray viewing:

Movie setting:

Backlight-68

Brightness-50

Contrast-75

Color-49

Tint-0

Sharpness-2

Color Temperature:

Red gain-106

Green gain-107

Blue gain-116

Red offset-128

Green offset-128

Blue offset-128

Advanced Picture settings:

Smoth Motion-OFF

Noise Reduction-OFF

MPEG NR-OFF

Color Enhancement-OFF

Adaptive Lumina-LOW

Film Mode-AUTO

Backlight Control-OFF

Ambient Light Sensor-OFF


For Cable TV viewing:

Standard setting:

Backlight-92

Brightness-50

Contrast-80

Color-60

Tint-0

Sharpness-3

Color Temperature:

Red gain-106

Green gain-107

Blue gain-116

Red offset-128

Green offset-128

Blue offset-128

Advanced Picture settings:

Smoth Motion-OFF

Noise Reduction-OFF

MPEG NR-OFF

Color Enhancement-NORMAL

Adaptive Lumina-MEDIUM

Film Mode-AUTO

Backlight Control-OFF

Ambient Light Sensor-OFF

For Netflix and Hulu viewing:

Standard setting:

Backlight-92

Brightness-50

Contrast-80

Color-60

Tint-0

Sharpness-8

Color Temperature:

Red gain-128

Green gain-128

Blue gain-128

Red offset-128

Green offset-128

Blue offset-128

Advanced Picture settings:

Smoth Motion-OFF

Noise Reduction-LOW

MPEG NR-LOW

Color Enhancement-NORMAL

Adaptive Lumina-LOW

Film Mode-AUTO

Backlight Control-OFF

Ambient Light Sensor-OFF

@Josh Kimball,

Looks very nice! Is that the Sanus LL11 mount? What are you doing for sound; the TV speakers or do you have something else setup?

How do you handle the different settings for the different source materials? Do you set them separately for each HDMI input? Or do you set them and somehow assign them to different "modes"? Or do you manually change them when you want to watch something different?

Thank you,

@psklenar

Thanks. I am using the tv speakers at the moment, but I find them to be tinny and lacking low end. The mount is the Sanus F80b Low Profile Fixed Tilt Mount. For settings Movie is set to HDMI 2 For Bluray and Standard is set on HDMI 1 for Direct TV. The Internet apps save their own setting independent of input settings which is nice. I kept those settings mostly the same, but did turn off motion smoothing and tweaked a few others. Netflix streams great, but selecting 3.2mb on Hulu is way superior, looks like a full HD broadcast. Unfortunately I live way out in the country so that setting tests the limits of my bandwidth, I only can watch about 20 seconds of Hulu before having to choose a lower bandwidth and lesser quality. A trade off to country living, fresh air, but limited Internet.

JOSH KIMBALL: Thanks for your settings. Even though room conditions (and maybe even displays) differ, it is always fun to try them out!

Josh. One thing almost all of us here have verified. The PQ improves as your hours of use increase. My wife and I both noticed the difference very easily. Something to look forward to. The current issue of Sound & Vision Magazine has a comp. test of a dozen small speakers priced between $250 and $400pr. Wish I'd seen this a year ago.

I've seen a couple of posts talking about bright spots in the bottom corners. I bought this set Jan 17th at Sams Club, and just recently started noticing strange spots, mostly in the bottom corners but a couple along the sides and maybe one center bottom (about 15 in total I count). They don't really look like dead pixels as they are only visible with a lighter shade color graphic (like white, soft yellows / browns, etc.). Referring to the pics, is this what some of you have seen (they're hard to capture with the camera I was using and you can't really see them all)? Did you return the set because of it? I plan on calling Sams about an exchange since I'm within the 90 day return window but wanted to know what you guys think.

@NachoB

Sorry your having issues with the display. Looks to me like stuck pixels. Do you have a calibration disc? I have the Disney Wow disc which includes pixel flipper. If this is the problem try using this disc or one with this feature and let it run for at least a few hours or over night. There are tons of posts in this thread with information about fixing stuck pixels, if that is the problem. One thing I would absolutely not recommend is rubbing the screen. Some people swear by it, but I beleveIt is a myth. All you will accomplish is damaging the panel with scratches or removing anti glare coating and possibly damaging more of the LCD panel underneath. I have read some extensive articles where they tested this myth and the results and recommendations were the same every time, it doesn't work, don't do it or you risk damaging the display. Hope this helps, I will search for those articles and post them on here.

Here is a link to one article out there. There are thousands of articles that claim it does work and as many that claim it doesn't, so proceed at your own risk. If it doesn't go away you should exercise your warranty and have the issue corrected by the manufacturer. Good luck.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/1137/14

Thanks for the replies. A couple of them, that are maybe 1/8" long, almost look like a tear, for lack of a better description. Where one side is slightly less visible than the opposite side. Very strange, and not as defined as I've seen in the past with dead / stuck pixels. I'll look into the WOW disc and see what happens.

@Andy Sullivan

Thanks for the info. I was leaning toward the YSP-3300, but will probably end up getting 2 JBL L830's in cherry with cherry speaker stands bi-wired to a Denon AVR-1913 for the fronts and also a JBL LCICH3 center channel as well. With 2 more of the L830's to follow later for surround. That's still at least a few months off though.

They really like 2 or 3 of these pairs and I guess I would price those three and go from there. I did like the recommendation of adding a sub woofer. They even mentioned some brands. When Brent Butterworth say's that the Polk Audio RTIAI (priced at a nasty MSRP of $324pr), he had to re-check the price when he saw the fit and finish of the speakers. He went on to say that paired with a $100-$150 sub woofer the RTIAI's would rock your world. That puts them at the top of my short list.

I ended up returning mine the other day as my return window was nearly up. Panel had horizontal banding, dirty screen effect on pans, bad clouding on all four corners and few spots in middle, and the dark spots in corners that everyone has along with few at bottom. I had 3 different of these sets and all had variable pq issues and the pq was different on all. Hopefully the new M series will take care of the 70" panels issues.

Just looked at the 70" at Costco and overall I'm impressed. However, there was a distinct orange tone to almost everything (any face looked like a bad spray tan when compared to nearby sets). I had them find the remote and we took it off Vivid and changed it to both movie and standard mode and also a factory reset under the picture mode. I really couldn't see any major change in the orange tone (it was still there). Is this normal with this tv/panel and could I expect to be able to adjust this out? Also, I see a lot of talk about a new "M" series, is there going to be a 70" model in this series and should I expect an improvement?

Yes there will be a 70" M Series. Any orange tone can easily be removed. "M" Series should be a really good deal if you want 3D.

I found that all of the "canned" picture modes were TERRIBLE. I adjusted the settings myself & the PQ is great, no regrets buying this TV.

I just took the plunge. I hope that it is worth it! Can't wait till it gets here on Tuesday.

Has anyone tried the THX app for iPhone/ipad to calibrate this set, the app has just been updated and is free again.

I downloaded the app, but dont have the hdmi cable for the ipad

Local BJ's club has this TV for 1519.