My wife and I spent the majority of the day looking at the Grand Wega II 60XBR800. We were highly disappointed. I was going to buy one today after I saw it 2 days ago at my local Ultimate Electronics store. However after reading a few posts here about the picture looking “CRAPPY†on non high-definition I decided to take my Ultimate TV into the store and see what it would look like with something that I use most of the time. I would also like to thank you guys that brought this to our attention, you saved myself and the store I was going to purchase it from lots of headaches by preventing a purchase and a return.
I will tell you that the picture was completely unacceptable. We tried really hard to tweak and get it looking good, but those artifacts will just not go away. Now granted people say the picture is as good as the source, but why then is the picture almost flawless on my 50†XBR rear projection? To continue with the story, we spent most of the day at one home theater store, and even the salesperson agreed that the picture was crap.
We decided, ok, let’s see how DVD’s look on this thing, we may be able to live with the artifacts, and possibly just use it to watch DVD’s , sorry to say that the picture was better, but there were still significant amount of artifacts.
We then looked at other rear-projection non-LCD sets to see if it’s just the Sony. We looked at the Mitsubishi WS65712, and WS73909, both very nice and almost no artifacts, one of them of course being a 73†picture which of course blows the theory of the larger the picture the more artifacts, not true on this 73“, the picture was almost flawless. .
We only played DVD’s through the 2 Mitsubishi’s but their picture was many times better then that Sony.
We did play our Ultimate TV unit on the Pioneer Elite Pro-720HD at another reseller and we were pretty impressed with the picture. We are not sure what we are going to buy now, possibly just keep our 53XBR and wait for the technology to smooth out. We were so excited about getting the GWII but our expectations were shattered when we actually spent time with it.
We learned a few things from this experience:
-High Definition is not where it needs to be yet.
-If you are going to test out these TV’s insist on them not showing you high definition. After all there are only 1 to 3 channels off the air, and only 3 on Direct TV (and that’s if you spend about $800 on an HD tuner/receiver)
-Bring your own DVD’s with you. I was very disappointed in the quality that the Sony 60XBR800 displayed with DVD’s that were not very high quality, we did see Star Wars II Attack of the Clones on a 50XBR800, and we were fairly impressed, but again, that is a very high quality DVD, and most DVD’s people watch are not going to be of that caliber.
-Also pay really close attention to the HD programming. I did like the Sony 60XBR800 for the HD picture, but upon closer examination it seems to have more artifacts then the other HD TV’s mentioned above.