Edit: May 29th, 2003. I ended up exchanging this set for a 57xwx20b a few months after this review. The problem reds either started getting worse or I just started noticing them more and more to the point that they were driving me nuts. So far the new set is much, much better in this regard and I will write up a similar post on that one after it gets the ISF treatment. /edit
This will be a multi-post review. Go get a drink.
A little background first.
This is my first RPTV. Before this I had nothing but direct view sets. The largest being a 27 inch JVC. I'm an extremely picky person that has the unfortunate ability to see flaws in damn near anything. I researched this purchase for probably close to a year (ruling out the Sammy 507 after playing with a couple of them and REALLY wanting to like them). I narrowed the possibilites down to the Toshiba HDX50H82 and the Hitachi 51swx20b. I went with the Hitachi mainly because I can't find an HDX in town.
Note: I immediately did a quick calibration with both sets. Contrast would usually end up being about 35 to 40 percent, brightness about 45 and sharpness all the way down. With my first set all I had as refference was the THX section of many DVD's but by the time I got the second, I finally had Avia.
--------------------
Pre ISF section
--------------------
I got my first (of two) sets a couple months ago and immediately noticed some problems with it. It had a couple of the famous fingerprint smudges and an enormous amount of "spots" that looked to me like dirsty lenses. I had the Circuit City technician come out and was amazed by his tremedous incompetence. He recommended I get another set without even investigating the problem at all and claimed he couldn't see anything I was pointing out. It might have been subtle but even my clueless friends could see it.
Anyway, I get the second set about two weeks later and noticed this one had handles on the sides that the other did not. I'm not sure if that means anything but there does appear to be a couple variations of the cabinet design out there so if you need handles, you might want to ask about this. After inspecting for smudges and finding none, I turned it on and still saw some of the "spots" but not nearly as bad. When viewing 2:35 aspect ration DVD's I noticed a slight geometry error in the bottom right part of the screen. Not bad but noticable. My girlfriend couldn't see it until I held a straight edge up to it. The convergence on this set was actually not as good out of the box as the other one.
Both sets had a ridiculous amount of red push. With the spots I mentioned showing up mostly in reds, this made them both look terrible with anything that had a lot of red to it. A good example is the Scorpion King DVD. There are a lot of scenes that are at night with most light coming from fires. These scenes looked terrible to everyone that saw them. The second set was a little better here than the first one but both were bad. Reds in general just didn't look good to me. I could see what I could only describe as noise in them all the time. Scenes that lacked red looked pretty good. Some looked spectacular even.
Digital cable looked about like you would expect. Crappy. The pay channels like HBO look pretty good most of the time but pretty much everything else is best described as "watchable" but nothing beyond that. VHS actually looks better. Unfortunately I have no STB yet.
I'll mention something here that I never knew about with RPTV's that might surprise first timers. Under certain circumstances, light will reflect off the screen, back to the mirror and then back to the screen again making this "halo" of sorts. If there's something like a very dark night scene with a bright moon in it, there will be a large halo effect around the moon. So large that you'll never see it go all the way around. It will usually go off the screen before it can do a full circle. It's not usually a big deal but there are times when it can be very annoying. With 2:35 dvd's the halo will go into the black bars on the top or bottom making it extremely noticable. Sometimes it looks like it's supposed to be there but that will blow the illusion every time. This same phenomenon can cause other minor issues. Attack of the Clones has some scenes where there's a bright desert background with characters in the foreground. The brightness of the background can actually cause the details of the characters robes to be washed out. It's not a huge deal but I do find it annoying at times and it isn't something that's always there. Apparently this is common to most RPTV's.
Not being completely happy with the performance I was getting, I decided to go the ISF route. By pure luck I stumbled upon an ISF tech on this forum that lives only 30 minutes away. His name is Michael Hamilton and posts here under the username Coyotes (which is what tipped me off that he might be local, that's the name of our NHL team).
This will be a multi-post review. Go get a drink.
A little background first.
This is my first RPTV. Before this I had nothing but direct view sets. The largest being a 27 inch JVC. I'm an extremely picky person that has the unfortunate ability to see flaws in damn near anything. I researched this purchase for probably close to a year (ruling out the Sammy 507 after playing with a couple of them and REALLY wanting to like them). I narrowed the possibilites down to the Toshiba HDX50H82 and the Hitachi 51swx20b. I went with the Hitachi mainly because I can't find an HDX in town.
Note: I immediately did a quick calibration with both sets. Contrast would usually end up being about 35 to 40 percent, brightness about 45 and sharpness all the way down. With my first set all I had as refference was the THX section of many DVD's but by the time I got the second, I finally had Avia.
--------------------
Pre ISF section
--------------------
I got my first (of two) sets a couple months ago and immediately noticed some problems with it. It had a couple of the famous fingerprint smudges and an enormous amount of "spots" that looked to me like dirsty lenses. I had the Circuit City technician come out and was amazed by his tremedous incompetence. He recommended I get another set without even investigating the problem at all and claimed he couldn't see anything I was pointing out. It might have been subtle but even my clueless friends could see it.
Anyway, I get the second set about two weeks later and noticed this one had handles on the sides that the other did not. I'm not sure if that means anything but there does appear to be a couple variations of the cabinet design out there so if you need handles, you might want to ask about this. After inspecting for smudges and finding none, I turned it on and still saw some of the "spots" but not nearly as bad. When viewing 2:35 aspect ration DVD's I noticed a slight geometry error in the bottom right part of the screen. Not bad but noticable. My girlfriend couldn't see it until I held a straight edge up to it. The convergence on this set was actually not as good out of the box as the other one.
Both sets had a ridiculous amount of red push. With the spots I mentioned showing up mostly in reds, this made them both look terrible with anything that had a lot of red to it. A good example is the Scorpion King DVD. There are a lot of scenes that are at night with most light coming from fires. These scenes looked terrible to everyone that saw them. The second set was a little better here than the first one but both were bad. Reds in general just didn't look good to me. I could see what I could only describe as noise in them all the time. Scenes that lacked red looked pretty good. Some looked spectacular even.
Digital cable looked about like you would expect. Crappy. The pay channels like HBO look pretty good most of the time but pretty much everything else is best described as "watchable" but nothing beyond that. VHS actually looks better. Unfortunately I have no STB yet.
I'll mention something here that I never knew about with RPTV's that might surprise first timers. Under certain circumstances, light will reflect off the screen, back to the mirror and then back to the screen again making this "halo" of sorts. If there's something like a very dark night scene with a bright moon in it, there will be a large halo effect around the moon. So large that you'll never see it go all the way around. It will usually go off the screen before it can do a full circle. It's not usually a big deal but there are times when it can be very annoying. With 2:35 dvd's the halo will go into the black bars on the top or bottom making it extremely noticable. Sometimes it looks like it's supposed to be there but that will blow the illusion every time. This same phenomenon can cause other minor issues. Attack of the Clones has some scenes where there's a bright desert background with characters in the foreground. The brightness of the background can actually cause the details of the characters robes to be washed out. It's not a huge deal but I do find it annoying at times and it isn't something that's always there. Apparently this is common to most RPTV's.
Not being completely happy with the performance I was getting, I decided to go the ISF route. By pure luck I stumbled upon an ISF tech on this forum that lives only 30 minutes away. His name is Michael Hamilton and posts here under the username Coyotes (which is what tipped me off that he might be local, that's the name of our NHL team).
