With LCD TVs nipping at their heels, plasma sets have quickly abandoned their industrial heritage and evolved to become a user-friendly centerpiece for your home theater. Basically, they've grown bigger — screen sizes will soon hit 70 inches — and accrued tons of cool features. At $7,000 list (you're likely to find it selling for up to two grand less), Hitachi 's 42HDT51 isn't the most affordable plasma HDTV out there in its size range, but it sure does come loaded.
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Topping its feature list is a motorized, remote-controlled stand that swivels left and right. This can prove very handy if you set it up in a home gym or some other sofa-less environment. But Hitachi 's plasma also comes with plentiful picture-setup and -enhancement features and just about any type of connector you could want. And with a built-in HDTV tuner that handles both over-the-air broadcasts as well as digital cable, it lets you watch high-def programs right out the box.
The Hitachi 's high-tech looks are another distinguishing point, as you can see from our photo. A two-piece system, the TV comes with a matching A/V switchbox that connects to the display panel with a supplied 10-foot cable.
Front-panel controls on the switchbox include volume, channel, and input selection. Beneath a flip-up panel there's also a button to get into the set's menus, along with a quick-connect A/V input for camcorders and a USB port for plugging in a digital camera. The back panel offers an up-to-date bundle of connectors, including dual HDMI and FireWire ports (see “key features”). The HDMI inputs are an especially nice touch since they let you digitally connect both a DVD player and an external satellite or cable box.
Hitachi has updated its TV remote controls, and the changes are all welcome. The wand that comes with the 42HDT51 doesn't have a backlit keypad, but its button layout is clean and well organized, making operation easy in a dark room. There are two nice ergonomic touches: a notch on the bottom that lets you hold it firmly, and a couple of scroll wheels for channel surfing and adjusting volume with your thumb. Hitting the Input button calls up an onscreen list of sources for you to select from (you can customize names like DVD, Cable, and VCR in the setup menu). And pressing Aspect gives you a choice of six display modes, including one stretch and three picture-zoom options. Unlike those on many HDTVs, three of the modes also work with high-def 1080i and 720p signals.
SETUP Hitachi provides a wealth of setup options that might leave some casual users scratching their heads when they browse the TV's dense menu selections (an Easy Setup brochure is also supplied). But videophiles will be smiling when they find out what's there. To get going, you either plug in a UHF antenna or connect your digital cable line and plug in a CableCARD provided by your local cable company. (Unfortunately, cable providers won't just send you one — you need to make an appointment for an installer to perform this simple task.)
I went the indoor-antenna route — 20 bucks at Radio Shack, Model 15-1868 — and the Hitachi immediately pulled in all my local stations. After using the set's onscreen signal meter to tweak the antenna position for best reception, I hit the Guide button on the remote and was able to scan through the channels. Some of the digital ones even included proper station IDs and program descriptions! Six years into the digital-TV transition, and we're finally getting somewhere.
Other setup features include Day and Night custom picture presets for each input, an option to display gray or black sidebars when you're watching standard 4:3 programs, and various screensaver functions to prevent burn-in. There are also three black-level and four color-temperature settings. But if you have a DVD test disc and are willing to take the time, the Hitachi 's most useful setup options are its Color Management and Color Decoding menus. Using these, I was able to dive in and do an unusually precise fine-tuning of the TV's color balance (see “in the lab”).
PICTURE QUALITY To check out how the Hitachi handled DVDs, I connected a Bravo D2 player to its HDMI input and watched the movie Elf. During a snowball-fight scene in New York City 's Central Park , the snowdrifts displayed a realistic range of white highlights. Will Ferrell's green-and-yellow costume as the elf, Buddy, looked bright and vivid, but I could also see subtle greenish hues like the moss clinging to the sides of boulders peeking out from under the snow.
In a scene inside a department store's gaudy North Pole display, the skin tones of Buddy, his brother, Michael, and his object of affection, Jovie, all looked natural despite their very surreal surroundings. Watching the same scenes using the TV's component-video connection, I was impressed at how close they came to the HDMI image — a good indicator of the TV's video-processing abilities.
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Later on in Elf, things take a dark turn and Buddy ends up on a bridge contemplating suicide. In this gloomy sequence, the shots of the bridge and cars passing on it showed some detail, but the shadows were closer to dark gray than true black. This made those images look somewhat flat compared with the movie's many brighter scenes. I also noticed some false contouring — bands of color instead of a smooth progression of dark to light tones — in a sequence from Master and Commander where the English ship retreats into the fog following a skirmish with the French. However, in most other movies and TV shows I watched it wasn't an issue.
An HDNet college match between Illinois and Gonzaga looked fabulously crisp on the Hitachi . When the action ended and the victorious Illinois players gathered on the court, I could easily make out the fluffy texture of a white terrycloth towel draped across a player's shoulders. And the bright red of their uniforms looked extremely lush without any bleeding or softening of detail in the folds of the material.
BOTTOM LINE With its slick design, even slicker motorized stand, and numerous high-end picture adjustments, Hitachi 's 42HDT51 has a lot to offer. And its highly capable built-in HDTV tuner and wide assortment of video connections sweeten the deal. Unlike plasmas past, this user-friendly TV is simple to set up and its picture looks great almost right out of the box. If that's not evolution, I don't know what is.
In the Lab
Color temperature (Standard mode)
Low window (20-IRE) ....................... 6,387 K
High window (80-IRE) ...................... 6,495 K
Brightness
(100-IRE window) ............................ 27.5 ftL
After I selected its Standard color temperature and made only basic picture-control adjustments, the Hitachi 42HDT51 measured close to the 6,500 K grayscale standard — so close that calibration wasn't necessary. Grayscale tracking was good. The Hitachi was able to display both above-white and below-black signals via its HDMI input, and maximum picture brightness was about average for a 42-inch plasma TV. Picture overscan was 3% — also typical. The color-decoder check pattern on the Avia Guide to Home Theater setup DVD showed a 15% red push on the component-video input and 5% on the HDMI input. Both deviations were easily fixed using the TV's user-accessible Color Decoding and Color Management menus.
— A.G.