While HDTVs are a lot cheaper now than they were a few years back, the options are still limited if you're looking to score a high-def model for not too much cash. You can get a hefty direct-view tube TV for less than $1,000, but the screen size on that baby is likely to be only 30 inches or less — too small if you want an engaging home theater experience. Moving up into the $1,000 to $2,000 range, you'll find sets like Hitachi 's 46F510 rear-projection TV (RPTV). With a big 46-inch screen and loads of videophile-friendly features, it just might be your ticket to the world of wide-screen DVDs and high-definition television. At $1,700, the price is certainly right.
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Viewed head-on, the Hitachi has a simple, understated look. There's a little too much silver for my taste, but it's likely to match any late-model A/V gear. No memory-card slots or other “multimedia” frills adorn its front panel — only a glowing red power button and a flip-up door concealing controls for such basic functions as channel/input selection and menu navigation. There's also a Magic Focus button that activates the set's automatic tube convergence system.
The Hitachi has a serviceable jack pack, including two sets of component-video connections and a DVI (Digital Visual Interface) input. You can't easily use video sources with all three, however, because the DVI port and one of the component connections feed the same Input 1, with DVI taking precedence. Also, the dual antenna jacks handle only analog broadcasts and cable-TV signals, so you'll need a separate HDTV tuner if you want to pull in your local digital TV channels.
As far as remote controls go, the one that comes with this TV is fairly ordinary. There's no backlit keypad, and the handset itself is on the small side. You can access many of the TVs more advanced functions directly through the keypad, including the two custom picture presets for each input (Day and Night) and selectable 540p (progressive-scan) and 1080i (interlaced) video upconversion for standard signals. (Some TV makers find it easier to upconvert signals to 540p rather than the more common 480p format since 540p uses the same scan rate as 1080i.) There are also five buttons for switching between inputs instead of having to use one button to toggle through them — a rare and desirable feature on a TV remote.
Display modes (aspect ratios) are accessed by stepping through the selections with the Aspect button. There are six choices for standard (480i/p) programs: 4:3 Standard with either gray or black sidebars, depending on your selection in the setup menu; 16:9 Standard for widescreen anamorphic DVDs and digital broadcasts; 4:3 Expanded to stretch standard programs to fill the screen; and 16:9 Zoom, 4:3 Zoom1, and 4:3 Zoom2 to expand images to various degrees. For high-def 720p and 1080i programs, the options are 16:9 Standard and 16:9 Zoom, which lets you fill the screen with upconverted HDTV programs that show 4:3 images flanked by black bars.
SETUP Setting up the Hitachi starts with a push of its front-panel Magic Focus button. This feature does a decent job of aligning the TV's red, green, and blue cathode-ray tubes, and you can fine-tune things further using the manual adjustments in the Setup menu.
I was impressed by the sheer number of tweaky adjustment options on the Hitachi . For those custom picture adjustments, you'll find all the basic controls (like color, contrast, brightness) and also variable settings for Edge Enhancement (a.k.a. scan-velocity modulation, or SVM), which sharpens the edges of objects by boosting brightness in light areas of the picture and deepening shadows in dark areas; Color Decoding, which adjusts the overall level of red, green, and blue in the image (a service-level setting normally unavailable to users); and Color Management, a set of six sliders for tweaking individual color channels. There's also a setting called Black Enhancement that's intended to enhance shadow detail, but I felt the picture looked better with this switched off.
Like any tube-based TV, the Hitachi looked best in a dimly lit room. Two more reasons I'd make a point of watching it in a reasonably dark environment are its somewhat limited light output and highly reflective screen shield, which can allow light from windows or nearby lamps to show up on the screen. But its carefully controlled brightness is actually a good thing. Compared with similar CRT-based RPTVs I've tested, some of which had high-gain screens designed to maximize brightness at the expense of picture uniformity, there was virtually no hotspotting — the screen looked as bright and uniform from off-center seats as when viewed straight on.
PICTURE QUALITY DVDs looked very good on the Hitachi using either its 540p or 1080i upconversion setting, but the picture improved even further when I hooked up a Bravo D2 player to its DVI input. In a scene from The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King where Merry and Ara-gorn watch Pippin ride off into danger with Gandalf, the skin tones of the two gazing at their departing comrades looked completely natural, and so did the brown-orange landscape and the blue streams cutting across it. And in a later nighttime scene where Pippin worriedly looks out from a stone balcony in Minas Tirith, I could see plenty of shadow detail in both the towering walls of the castle and the dark, craggy mountains surrounding it.
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To check out the Hitachi 's handling of HDTV, I tuned in to a consistently crisp-looking program, HDNet's World Report. Watching a news segment on alternative energy, I could clearly see the texture of the soil, rocks, and grass in a shot of a house built into a hillside. Picture detail seemed a step beneath the best (and far more expensive) DLP and plasma-based sets I've seen, but the difference wasn't all that dramatic. And the wide range of subtle green and brown tones in the desert plants and foliage confirmed what I had observed when watching the Lord of the Rings DVD — that the Hitachi 46F510 HDTV has outstanding color reproduction.
In a Raiders vs. Buccaneers game on ESPN HD, the clearly visible mesh of the players' uniforms really brought the action into my living room. The bright red numbers on the Tampa uniforms were vivid without being soft, and the green turf of the playing field didn't have the artificial look I've seen on some other TVs.
BOTTOM LINE With many HDTVs still at three or four grand and up, it's nice to know you can get a great-looking big-screen set for about half that price. Hitachi 's 46F510 doesn't hug the wall, and it doesn't have a lot of features beyond those videophile-friendly picture adjustments. But if you're looking to get into HDTV on the cheap, I can't think of a better place to start.
Color temperature (Night mode/Medium setting before/after calibration)
Low window (20-IRE) .............. 6,606/6,455 K
High window (80-IRE) ............. 6,088/6,539 K
Brightness (100-IRE window before/after calibration) 20.3/19.4 ftL
Hitachi's 46F510 provides four color-temperature presets: Black and White, Standard, Medium, and High. Of the four, Medium measured closest to the 6,500-K standard, tracking evenly through most of its grayscale but veering toward red near the high end. Calibration via the service-menu controls easily corrected this. After adjustment, the set measured within ±500 K through most of its range. (Calibration needs to be performed by a qualified technician with specialized equipment, so discuss it with your dealer before purchase, or call the Imaging Science Foundation at 561-997-9073.)
Picture geometry and focus were very good out of the box, and overscan measured about 4% on all sides, slightly higher than average. A color-decoding error (–10% green) was easily fixed using the Color Decoding adjustment in the user menu. DC restoration — the set's ability to hold a constant black level through shifts in average picture brightness — was excellent, with almost no movement visible on the Overscan Bounce pattern from the Avia test DVD. Screen uniformity was outstanding for a CRT-based display, with picture brightness holding fast over a wide viewing angle. — A.G.