HDTV Displays

This story actually starts with a DVD Audio player! DVD Audio is a defunct HD audio format from 2001 (along with SACD) that brings the master recording to your home. Unfortunately the DVD forum and mastering houses failed in execution of this new standard making many of the titles auto play for multi-channel only, not stereo; an irritating premise for a 2 channel audiophile minimalist requiring a video monitor to navigate the menus to the stereo tracks. Indeed, DVD Audio listening time was few and far between due to this hassle.

What my DVD Audio world needed was an inexpensive, small LCD display with quick and convenient disconnects...

This portion of the review details how the Mitsubishi LT-46148 LCD HDTV performed on the test bench. Please read the Mitsubishi LT-46148 LCD HDTV Review Essentials, if you have not already.

RGB 0-255 can't pass below black because black is 0. Unfortunately the same goes for YPbPr 16-235 yet with that video signal black is 16 so it could if designed to do so. Bottom line, no below black signals will pass. While not a severe error, it is one that Videophiles should take note of since some small portion of consumer video content will exceed 16 or 235 by a few notches and an ISF calibration would setup a display to account for that anomaly. This one...

LCD has come a long way since just a few years ago, taking over the flat panel market up to about 50" in screen size. While Mitsubishi is far better known for rear projection DLP since the demise of CRT, market forces can't be ignored and consumers remain spellbound by the flat panel concept in their homes. Let's see what Mitsubishi has to offer and how their LCD products compare.

Since last year Mitsubishi has offered 40", 46" and 52" models and the LT46148 is part of their current line of 1920x1080 displays.

The TV looks visually appealing and has a high build quality. There is a clear plastic frame that goes around the TV. The TV weighs 84 pounds (38 Kg) with the pedestal and measures 49.7" (126 cm) wide by 31.3" (79.5 cm) high by 17.7" (32 cm) deep (4.8" (12 cm) without the pedestal). We immediately took the TV off the default setting and changed it to cinema. Cox cable looked very bad. So bad that we recommended switching to satellite. Braden has Cox as one of his sources so his impression was that Cox does not look that bad on his TVs. It could be that this TV does not do well with compressed sources. OTA HD looked much better. In general OTA digital channels looked better than the SD coming from the Cox cable box.

We then popped in a Blu-ray disc...

We recently did a review of the Pioneer Elite PRO-150FD 60" Plasma TV back in November (Podcast 224) so when Pioneer offered us the 42 inch model we weren't sure that we wanted to review a TV that was so similar. Since the TV was 720p we decided that it was different enough to warrant a review.