If you're going to be sitting 10-13' back and want the true Home Theater experience, you should be looking over the 73" Mit. At that distance on a 48", it's like watching a 27" directview from across the room, like we all used to do.
I watch my 65" Panny at 8', and that is one of my primary criteria as to whether my calibration has been performed correctly. If my clients don't immediately want to scoot their viewing chairs closer by a few feet, to see that now much bigger picture in ultra high-precision high resolution, I feel I have not done my job right.
At 10-13' back, your experience of watching a 48" will be that of watching a "little guy", not a truelife bigscreen.
You can see my 65" - photographed on tripod at 6' with a 35mm analog camera - as the front cover of my webpage, below, if you're interested.
That said, Mit has it all over Hitachi, in the fine precision convergence area. Again, if you are going to be sitting that far back, high precision in convergence will not be a big issue. But you still won't be getting the true "bigscreen" experience. To have that, the convergence must be done to a high-precision science, and you must wish to be sitting at a distance that will allow you to capture the same parallax parameters that apply when you sit where you are most comfortable in front of the REALLY big screen at your local mall theater.
Hitachis do not allow you to converge on anything but the overly hot internal service grid they put out, the grid lines are far too thick, and you can't see what you are doing when your cursor is on those lines. You have to move your cursor off from where you really want it, to see what you want to be doing when you are where you want to be. It's very convoluted and distracting, doing things that way.
Hit also does not have offscreen points like Mit does, to use to get the onscreen points excellent. It also has just a smattering of selections per point, as opposed to the +-511 selections per point in each of the H and V directions, on the Mits. That's 1022 selections horzontally and the same vertically, per point. NOT so on the Hitachis.
Along with curling at corners easily, such that you have to straighten things out at that cursor point occasionally, when you memorize your corrections, the Hit pic always comes back a little bit different from what it was before you memorized it.
None of this sloppiness happens on a Mit.
I'd take a Mit over a Hitachi any day of the week, both as a calibrator and as an end user.
Mr Bob
