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I’m blown away by my first HDTV! What can I say? Guess I already did…, November 28, 2011

By 

Michael Gmirkin (Beaverton, Oregon, USA) – See all my reviews

  

  

Snagged this beautiful monstrosity on a Black Friday sale for 0 off (too good a deal to pass up on). I almost didn’t pull the trigger, but I’m so darned glad I did. From what I’ve seen of it so far in the approximately 4 days I’ve had it and one day I’ve played with it, I love it. As long as it doesn’t blow up or fall over, I’ll be a happy camper!

While I haven’t yet played a Blu-Ray with it, I’ve upconverted the bare Avatar DVD and piped it through the Sony BD player via HDMI, and unless you’re standing right up next to it, it looks absolutely fantastic. From the ~8-10 feet away my recliner’s situated, it just looks stunning. I’m sure Blu-Ray will look even better at native 1080p.

This TV isn’t for the faint of heart or for only one person to set up. It’s HEAVY. It’s at minimum a 2-person job getting it out of the box, assembling the base and positioning it on your entertainment center. Did I mention it’s heavy? Well, it’s 60″! What did I expect?

I’m still fiddling with the controls to figure out what’s the best way to view movies and such. I’m thinking I may have to leave the ‘film’ mode off, as I think that might be the anti-juddering smoothing feature that tends to give a very ‘soap opera’ visual effect. Like it does TOO GOOD a job cleaning up the picture. Especially on CGI / animated videos, it makes the CGI look VERY computer generated and a little mechanical rather than fluid like it should be.

The unit comes with several pre-set display options you can flip through, some of them being standard, movie, etc. I assume they play with the brightness, contrast, color temperature. I think I’ve generally left mine on Standard or Film and just turned off the anti-juddering features and things look pretty normal.

The colors seem vibrant and Avatar was just completely beautiful on the big screen, even with the standard definition source DVD. I’ve seen a number of units in the stores where the colors seem washed out or faded (poor contrast). Ad far as I can tell, this unit seems to have excellent color gamut.

I’m fairly new to this, so YMMV.

I’ll just say that, so far, I’m impressed and don’t regret this purchase in the slightest. Only thing I worry about is whether my existing entertainment center is sturdy / stable enough to hold the thing. I might end up buying a new smaller entertainment center that’s lower to the ground and designed for the super huge screens, just to be safe. So far, it seem reasonably stable, though. & attaching the base wasn’t all the difficult once I got the unit out of the box, which was a bit of a chore as I was ill-advisedly doing so on my own. The actual moving/setup I got help with though. Anyway, attaching the base is just basically inserting a metal bracket into the base and attaching 10 screws, then sliding those brackets attached to the base into the bottom of the TV and screwing in 4 more screw. Done. Pretty painless.

It’s got, I think 4 HDMIs (3 back, 1 side), 2 Composites/RCAs (1 back, 1 side), one component (back) and one coaxial (back), I think. And there might be an audio out / digital audio out too, if I remember right (I’d have to look).

I think it usually takes about 5-10 seconds to warm up and come on?

Oh, and it doesn’t come with any built-in ‘apps,’ which is fine. I’ve got those via my Blu-Ray player, so it would probably be somewhat redundant anyway…

I haven’t yet figured out what OPC stands for (it keeps coming up at the bottom of the screen with a couple indicator icons next to it). I’m thinking it’s maybe adjusting picture quality on the fly or something? If so, I wonder if there’s a way to turn it off or at least turn off the indicator, as it can be a little distracting at times.

It seems to come with a fold-out setup / quick start guide, but no manual per se? That’s perhaps a little disappointing. I’d rather like to have something to refer back to once in a while and learn all the ins and out of the TV’s functions / menus. Though most of the functions can be accessed through the Menu button and are largely self-explanatory.

So, there’s my thoughts on the matter. I hope they’re helpful. Haven’t found any major drawbacks yet other than just the fact it’s just big and heavy… But, if you can get past that, and have a nice sturdy place to put it, so far I can’t see much to complain about. I’ll have to wait until I’ve played a BluRay through it to give a final word on the 1080p playback. But, the movies I’ve played through my new WiFi-enabled Blu-Ray player have been great to look at. Not sure whether they were HiDef or not, but I guess if I can’t tell the difference unless I’m standing only ~12 inches way from the screen, it doesn’t much matter does it?

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 Comments (4)

Nice, picture, but out of sync and with few options, January 4, 2012

I received this as a 30th birthday present and have been unfortunately greatly disappointed. I should start out by saying the set looks good if you spend a little time setting it up, but I still will be taking it back.

1) The menu is broken and continues to reset the video settings to ‘cool’ – thus tinting everything slightly blue. You need to manual switch this back to normal each time you change channels or change inputs.

2) There is no option to turn off the internal speakers if you have surround sound hooked up – and the on board speakers are poor.

3) The on by default Dynamic Contrast settings make dark objects on screen too dark to see and bright objects severely washed out. Turning it off leaves you with a decent contrast level though.

4) Most importantly – the set suffers from HORRIBLE video lag. This means the picture is somewhere between 1/10 and 1/4 of a second behind the audio. There is no ‘Game’ Mode like the higher budget versions of this pannel.

On the lag – this is present on cable, but is worse when using my game console or Blu-ray player. For standard tv/movies this means that the audio and video are distractingly out of sync. Lips are moving after someone stops talking. Noises happen before events on screen. It also makes most action based video games frustrating to the point of being unplayable as your controller inputs appear to be delayed by almost 1/4 second, meaning moving cursors, characters or aiming is sloppy and inaccurate.

I am very much hoping this set is defective and will update once I have gotten a replacement. I would absolutely reccomend against this set for any gamer (even Wii games are frustratingly out of sync), and only reccomend it if you are looking for a decent set to watch the occasional movie or tv show on and are not at all disturbed by out of sync audio.

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great tv!!, December 20, 2011

very very nice tv. shopped around for a long time and the price is 0 cheaper at costco.picture is great. enough said

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