[Atacand]

Hey guys, I'm trying to decide which set I should go with and I've narrowed it down to 3 sets. Here are the 3 sets that I'm considering:


Sony KDL-46VL150

Toshiba REGZA 46XV645U

LG 42LH90


I know the LG is 4" smaller but its LED...I'm not sure if spending the extra money is worth getting something smaller just for LED. What do you guys think?

 

[BoilerJim]

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[frito]

LH90 is in another league picture quality wise than the others.


depending on how far you plan to sit from the TV though your often better served by getting the biggest TV you can find and take a look at Panasonic plasmas unless you have concerns of reflections/brightness due to the room being very well lit

 

[Brock2727]

I bought the Toshiba 46XV645U and received it yesterday. Thus far I have been very very happy with the picture quality. Absolutely outstanding set for what its currently selling for at most online retailers.

 

[frito]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Brock2727 /forum/post/18174826


I bought the Toshiba 46XV645U and received it yesterday. Thus far I have been very very happy with the picture quality. Absolutely outstanding set for what its currently selling for at most online retailers.

yeah the xv645u is a decent TV


i owned a 40xv645u for about a week


its a good performer for the money but it had some major flaws


if you put up a red green or blue 24bit color gradient on the screen it has banding issues, notably one large band before black that would turn almost black and then get lighter till it smoothed into black like it should.


I was able to tune the bands out of each of the primary colors by using this pattern and the colormaster function in the TV menus to adjust each of the colors independently, interestingly enough the area below that color band would never change when i adjusted the color settings for each color all changes stopped at the bad black band in the middle of the gradient.


the good news is its fixable i suppose but without having a color meter to do a real calibration i have no idea how close or far it was from being calibrated at those single settings that removed the problem.


The TV's motion enhancer works ok but produces a lot of artifacting compared to other better brands like sony and samsung


the last issue i had with it that really bothered me at night was the extremely purple tinged blacks at pretty much any viewing angle except dead on straight in the middle, it was very annoying. the black uniformity was also pretty poor out of the box but i was able to reduce the flashlights by loosening the cabinet screws in the corners of the TV


overall it was a decent TV for the money but for our use of a TV in the living room sitting 10' away we returned it and bought a Panny 50" X1 720p plasma and its many times better than the Toshiba was and cost the same amount of money. don't even miss 1080p at our viewing distance either because the 40" was too small to see the extra detail at 10' and the 50" 720p easily shows more detail due to its size at 10' away even though its only a 720p display

 

[Atacand]



Quote:
Originally Posted by BoilerJim /forum/post/18174739


AVS Members:


Please remember that AVS Forum is a place for people to talk about Home Theater and how to better it. It is where people come for advice on how they can get the best of what they own and to learn more about this hobby we love. People new to Home Theater also come to AVS Forum to receive advice on how to setup a theater and what may work for them in their home. we have professionals for all walks of life both seeking help and giving it freely.


What makes AVS Forum work so well? Well we try very hard to keep marketing posts and pricing off the site for this is not what we want AVS Forum to be. If we allowed it, it would quickly happen and AVS Forum would not be attractive to members looking to get help from others with the same passion.


With that said...I would like to add some rules in this forum area that seem to be needed due to past issues....SO PLEASE...



1) Do Not post pricing you found on-line or at a local dealer.


2) Do Not ask for, or offer, a receipt so people can price match.


3) Do Not say to "Call John Smith at ..." (you know what I mean)


4) Do Not put down someone else's choice in their purchase.


5) Do Not start a thread asking for the best TV for $XXXX or I have a $XXXXX to spend


6) Do Not Discus where to buy a TV.


7) No Power buys: you cannot start or solicit Power buys



Posts falling into the above mentioned items, as well as the main site rules, can and will be removed without notice. As you are well aware, we can not see all posts that are made and thus that is where the REPORT THIS POST option comes into play. Some posts may stand as you know after review, but please try to help put to keep AVS Forum clean of marketing. A member that continues down the same line of posting where his/her posts needed to be removed can be removed from the site.


I hope you can respect what we are asking, for our mission at AVS Forum is not how to get the best price, but how to achieve the best out of the gear you own or are looking to own.


Thank you kindly.


AVS Advertisers

Better?

 

[Atacand]



Quote:
Originally Posted by frito /forum/post/18174799


LH90 is in another league picture quality wise than the others.


depending on how far you plan to sit from the TV though your often better served by getting the biggest TV you can find and take a look at Panasonic plasmas unless you have concerns of reflections/brightness due to the room being very well lit

I do alot of gaming and have heard bad things about Plasmas and gaming.

 

[Atacand]



Quote:
Originally Posted by frito /forum/post/18174936


yeah the xv645u is a decent TV


i owned a 40xv645u for about a week


its a good performer for the money but it had some major flaws


if you put up a red green or blue 24bit color gradient on the screen it has banding issues, notably one large band before black that would turn almost black and then get lighter till it smoothed into black like it should.


I was able to tune the bands out of each of the primary colors by using this pattern and the colormaster function in the TV menus to adjust each of the colors independently, interestingly enough the area below that color band would never change when i adjusted the color settings for each color all changes stopped at the bad black band in the middle of the gradient.


the good news is its fixable i suppose but without having a color meter to do a real calibration i have no idea how close or far it was from being calibrated at those single settings that removed the problem.


The TV's motion enhancer works ok but produces a lot of artifacting compared to other better brands like sony and samsung


the last issue i had with it that really bothered me at night was the extremely purple tinged blacks at pretty much any viewing angle except dead on straight in the middle, it was very annoying. the black uniformity was also pretty poor out of the box but i was able to reduce the flashlights by loosening the cabinet screws in the corners of the TV


overall it was a decent TV for the money but for our use of a TV in the living room sitting 10' away we returned it and bought a Panny 50" X1 720p plasma and its many times better than the Toshiba was and cost the same amount of money. don't even miss 1080p at our viewing distance either because the 40" was too small to see the extra detail at 10' and the 50" 720p easily shows more detail due to its size at 10' away even though its only a 720p display

Most of the LCD's out there are going to have banding issues, flashlighting in the corners, and poor off angle viewing. Even the LG panels that supposedly use S-IPS have poor off angle viewing.

 

[frito]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Atacand /forum/post/18175161


Most of the LCD's out there are going to have banding issues, flashlighting in the corners, and poor off angle viewing. Even the LG panels that supposedly use S-IPS have poor off angle viewing.

my Panasonic 37S1 has none of these problems

 

[Atacand]



Quote:
Originally Posted by frito /forum/post/18175226


my Panasonic 37S1 has none of these problems

Maybe I should say most LCD's over 40". Too bad Panasonic doesn't make an LCD larger than 37".

 

[frito]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Atacand /forum/post/18175326


Maybe I should say most LCD's over 40". Too bad Panasonic doesn't make an LCD larger than 37".

thats one of the reasons why they only make plasmas over that size, they don't have any of those problems either, if you look at all of panasonic's TV's they are the only brand out there that pushes the viewing angle side of their TV's even the LCD's because lets face it the average person's living room will have seating all over the place and only 1 or 2 people will get to sit in most LCD's sweet spot for viewing, the rest of the people get the sort end of the LCD stick so to speak

the LG IPS panels while still not having perfect viewing angles fair better than most VA based TV's


Sony and Samsungs with S-PVA panels fair about as good as they do with viewing angles but suffer from clouding and flashlighting more than most


IPS-Pro panels used in the panasonic 32/37" LCD's are better than all of them with viewing angles horizontally but vertical angles are not good, no LCD has good vertical viewing angles and theres really no getting around it due to the way LCD works.


I used to have an S-PVA Sony and the viewing angles were fine, blacks were good, the panny comes the closest to it. the Toshiba's viewing angles were poor in comparison to both and its black level was only good if you were in the panels sweet spot of 0-20 degrees from centered


Blacks on the IPS panels are not as good as either but you can at least get used to the sight of blacklight leakage. having black turn purple or blue however is much harder to bear imho

 

[Atacand]

So, if you were me which set would you go with? I want a set that has good viewing angles. I've avoided plasma because of the burn-in fear. I do alot of gaming and figured LCD would be the better choice. Would you get a plasma for gaming? If so, I'd assume you would get Panasonic? I read about the black level issues on the G10...probably should avoid that model if I do go Plasma?

 

[frito]

image retention is really blown out of proportion, i own a plasma (but have not owned it for all that long)


but if you read about other users panasonic plasmas they have gamed on them for as much as 8 hours at a time with no image retention


Samsung plasma's have more IR problems than panasonic


for the best viewing angles period plasma is the way to go, its phosphor based like CRT and the picture does not change from 160 deg to 160 deg on my 50X1 beyond 160 degrees is pointless so who cares but the front glass and glare filter start to kill the picture at that point but on any LCD 160 degrees is beyond their capability of producing an accurate picture


as for the rising black issue, it does not matter that much if you comparing the blacks to LCD plasma beats them from any angle you look at the TV with blacks/dark images this is where LCD really fail is producing acceptable blacks from viewing angles that are not straight on, they all will get a color tinge to the black like purple, blue or white in the case of LG IPS LCD's


for heavy gaming input lag is more important as well as image blur when not using something like 120hz


MOST LCD's esp larger sized LCDs fail in this area terribly and if you want to read about input lag and gaming some more read the thread linked in my sig on input lag, it has lots of information on the problem as well as test results of many LCD's


just as a note i have no results of plasma's in that thread but panasonic plasmas have typically 30ms input lag in game modes and are very good for gaming compared to most LCD's

 

[Atacand]

Well according to those tests it appears the Toshiba 46XV645U averages around 27ms input lag so that would be a good choice. Don't know how the off angle viewing is on that set but I imagine it can't be all that bad.

 

[frito]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Atacand /forum/post/18176021


Well according to those tests it appears the Toshiba 46XV645U averages around 27ms input lag so that would be a good choice. Don't know how the off angle viewing is on that set but I imagine it can't be all that bad.

i did those tests


it performs very good with input lag but in game mode it has some major drawbacks you need to be aware of


worst drawback is visible smearing with dark images. i was somewhat suprised to see this but what it means is if you play games with dark graphics it will become a smear fest and you will hate it


other drawback that game mode brings on is very poor color range, i put color gradients up on the TV and rather than seeing a smooth gradient or some banding i saw massive amounts of banding it was actually worse than my 6 bit TN PC monitor! that is terrible


viewing angles were very bad on the Toshiba, blacks were only black if you stayed within 20 degrees of center, it was in my bedroom hooked up to my PC first because i had bought it to be my PC monitor/bedroom TV and sitting at my desk 3 feet from the TV centered blacks at the far left and right of the screen would start to show a purple color to them and shifting my position to the left side of the screen would make them turn black but the right side of the screen would then be very purple tinged


i found this problem to be particularly annoying when i was laying in bed watching TV. my bed is parallel with my computer desk with the right side of the bed facing the desk and when laying down my head's position is about 30-35 degrees to the left of the TV and about 15-20 degrees down from the TV and at that position anything dark had a purple color to it, it was very annoying. when we put this TV out in the living room at 10' away it was better in the direct seating straight ahead due to the distance away from the TV but it was just plain too small and people at the ends of the couch still never saw the best picture possible so it was far from optimal

 

[Atacand]



Quote:
Originally Posted by frito /forum/post/18176078


viewing angles were very bad on the Toshiba, blacks were only black if you stayed within 20 degrees of center, it was in my bedroom hooked up to my PC first because i had bought it to be my PC monitor/bedroom TV and sitting at my desk 3 feet from the TV centered blacks at the far left and right of the screen would start to show a purple color to them and shifting my position to the left side of the screen would make them turn black but the right side of the screen would then be very purple tinged


i found this problem to be particularly annoying when i was laying in bed watching TV. my bed is parallel with my computer desk with the right side of the bed facing the desk and when laying down my head's position is about 30-35 degrees to the left of the TV and about 15-20 degrees down from the TV and at that position anything dark had a purple color to it, it was very annoying. when we put this TV out in the living room at 10' away it was better in the direct seating straight ahead due to the distance away from the TV but it was just plain too small and people at the ends of the couch still never saw the best picture possible so it was far from optimal

Maybe you got a bad set? I've read other customer reviews about this same model and they said off angle viewing on this set was good.

 

[frito]



Quote:
Originally Posted by Atacand /forum/post/18176182


Maybe you got a bad set? I've read other customer reviews about this same model and they said off angle viewing on this set was good.

no i doubt i did, I've read professional reviews that said the very same thing i saw on this TV, its viewing angles are poor even compared to other LCD's


I would bet those people who said they were fine either are not that picky or had yet to watch the TV in a dark/dim environment, in the daytime/bright room this problem is much less apparent just like other LCD's

 

[frito]

 http://www.televisioninfo.com/conten...r-Accuracy.htm

Quote:
You can see that the 40XV645U had some problems with the color temperature at the darker end, with a bluish cast appearing, which is a problem and results in the Toshiba Regza 40XV645U's less than impressive score in this test.

they saw blue i saw purple so the panel was likely not the same exact in my set (panel lottery anyone)

Quote:
You can see that the Toshiba Regza 40XV645U had some problems with color reproduction here. In particular the curves show some significant jagged and bumpy spots, most obvious in the blue but also present in red and green. This means that at points the 40XV645U will make innacurate adjustments in color. We also see that the HDTV makes very little differentiation in red and green at the lower end of the intensity scale. This can cause loss of detail in dark areas. At the same time we see that the blue curve never drops to zero, which probably explains some of the problems we saw with color temperature above. The overall result is simply a poor performance all around.

http://www.televisioninfo.com/conten...ng-Effects.htm

Quote:
Viewing Angle (4.43)


The Toshiba Regza 40XV645U did not have a very imressive viewing angle, which we measured at 18 degrees from center. This is the point at which the television's contrast ratio falls below 50% of maximum. This is not uncommon amongst LCD televisions, but we've seen better from other LCD televisions, as you can see from our chart below where all three of our comparison televisions are LCDs. Plasma televisions tend to have far better viewing angle.


The result is that if you're sitting on a couch directly in front of the Toshiba Regza 40XV645U you probably won't run into a problem. But if you need a television for a large room where people are viewing the television from a wide range of angles you might want to consider another HDTV.

this is the only decent review i found of the xv645u and they also complained and gave the motion enhancer bad scores. i actually thought it did a decent job, it would never produce samsung SOE but on smooth it had a decent smoothing effect without destroying the film look completely. they gave it bad marks on creating artifacting and i did encounter that on the dark knight BD it totally glitched out an entire building at the start of the movie and turning it down only reduced the glitches the only way to remove them was to disable 120hz altogether. our plasma definitely performs better with motion IMO but i was pretty happy with the motion enhancer on the Toshiba

 

[Atacand]

Ugh...and the crappy thing is there's no store in my area that carry the Toshiba so I can't check it out before buying and if I order it online and didn't like it I'd be SOL. Maybe I'll just get the Sony from Costco for now and see if the price comes down a little more on the Vizio 47" LED they carry and exchange the Sony for it.


Thanks for all your help though!

 

[frito]

The Toshiba is a decent TV for the price but you will never find a perfect TV. if you look into those other models enough you will find short comings in them as well. its how it goes


viewing angles are never perfect on any LCD and the best ones will be the mid to high end sony and samsung sets due to their S-PVA panels but with the samsungs you gotta be careful because they put more than just S-PVA panels in the very same model TV's


the 47" Vizio uses LG's 47" IPS panel so it's viewing angles should be pretty good. none of these will compare to a plasma however


anyways good luck with the search for a TV