In a world gone mad for flat panels, I've gone on record for preserving the rear-projection television. Done right, the best DLP and LCoS RPTVs we've tested deliver huge, bright pictures with stunning image quality, at ridiculously low prices compared with like-size LCD or plasma sets. Yeah, I know — you can't hang one on a wall (excepting a few "slim" RPTVs now appearing), and you won't be quite the coolest cat on the block when your friends walk into your living room on Super Bowl Sunday. But if you don't mind a set with a few extra inches of depth, and can wait till the picture comes up to collect your oohs and aahs, an RPTV is a great choice.
That said, Mitsubishi remains among the most respected names in this field, a name built on many years of delivering premium-quality bigscreen TVs. The TV in my own den is a 42-inch Mits CRT rear-projector, a now-ancient model (by HDTV standards) whose image quality remains so good on HD material that I still can't see any reason to upgrade. So I was anxious to take a look at the Mitsubishi WD-57831 57-inch DLP HDTV, a 1080p model from the company's top-of-the-line Diamond Series. Of particular interest was this set's six-primary color system, the result of a newly designed color wheel and other refinements that add cyan, yellow, and magenta sub-primaries to the red, green, and blue primaries normally used to generate all colors.
FEATURES The 57831 has a sleek design, with a tiny, tapered base and a thin bezel around the screen intended to mimic the flat-panel look, which I'd say succeeds in looking swell while minimizing its impact in the room. As befits a high-end model, it's loaded with nice user features, including a premium jack pack with a pair of 1080p-capable HDMI inputs and a DVI input for PCs, a CableCARD slot (with built-in TV Guide On Screen program guide), a pair of FireWire (a.k.a. IEEE-1394 or i.Link) connectors, two antenna inputs (with a built-in digital TV tuner), and the usual load of component-, composite, and S-video inputs. Hidden behind a cover under the screen is a convenience station that includes another FireWire input (presumably for a digital camcorder) along with S- and composite-video jacks, control buttons, and a multi-slot card reader for loading photos from the most popular types of memory cards.
Mitsubishi supplies two remotes: a fully backlit main handset with numeric keypad and a small convenience remote that thoughtfully provides keys for power, channel and volume control, input selection, picture format (aspect ratio), and menu and channel guide access and navigation. I'm partial to dark hovels and backlit remotes and found this one intuitive and not overladen with buttons. Dedicated keys to pull up the Audio and Video menus are a hallmark of Mits remotes; I'm surprised we don't see them elsewhere more often.
There are no direct-access buttons to select individual inputs, which I also think should be on every TV remote, but hitting the Input key brings up a nice graphic menu that shows all active inputs, and the TV is quick to respond to your selections. Incidentally, when you plug in any new source, it's automatically detected and you're immediately given the option of renaming it to match the component (such as DVD or Cable) for onscreen identification. Nice touch.
Hitting the Format key on either remote toggles through the aspect-ratio screen modes. With HD material, you get just two options: Standard (about 3% measured overscan all around) and Wide Expand, which stretches the image from left to right for 4:3 digital programs but leaves it untouched vertically. With standard-def 4:3 programming, your choices expand to six different modes, including Narrow (showing 4:3 images natively with bars left and right), Standard (which stretches 4:3 programs to just fill out the screen with 3% overscan all around), and several stretch and zoom modes of different varieties (see Test Bench). All in all, there's hardly a standard-definition DVD or TV broadcast you can throw at this thing and not make it perfectly fill the 16:9 screen.
Meanwhile, pressing the Split button on the remote and then toggling with the Format key brings up an unusually wide selection of split-screen modes: 12 variations in all, depending on whether the main picture and sub-picture are 16:9 or 4:3 programs. Among these is the ability to look at two 16:9 programs side by side, or to display a 16:9 image alongside a 4:3 program. And you can quickly swap the audio between the two onscreen images. For sports fans, this will be a game-day bonanza during playoffs. I should also mention that the set features Mitsubishi's NetCommand system, which enables control of source components through the TV's onscreen menu system via infrared blasters.
|
The Short Form |
| $2,800 ($3,500 list) / mitsubishi-tv.com / 800-332-2119 |
|
Snapshot
|
| A feature-laden 1080p DLP rear-projection HDTV that looks sensational with high-quality source material. |
|
Plus
|
| •Excellent color and detail •Factory grayscale setting comes close to industry standard •Good facilities for tweaking color •Nice, user-friendly backlit remote |
|
Minus
|
| •Spotty handling of low-quality broadcast signals |
|
Key Features
|
| •1920 x 1080 DLP rear-projection HDTV •Two 1080p-capable HDMI inputs •6-primary color system •PerfectColor and PerfecTint color-palette controls •Full backlit remote plus second convenience remote •51.5 x 36.3 x 17.9 in; 85.8 lb |
Fortunately, switching to Natural with Low color temp brought the brightness down somewhat and gave the whites a more neutral or slightly reddish (warm) hue. But the picture still seemed too bright, and a quick check on a few scenes of the excellent Mission: Impossible III transfer on HD DVD showed obvious oversaturation of reds, a condition confirmed later with test patterns.
A basic user-menu calibration with a test disc got the contrast in line and brought out a bit more detail in the blacks. As for the red push, Mitusubishi provides some really cool controls in the user video menu dubbed PerfectColor and PerfecTint, which enable individual adjustment of saturation and hue of all of the set's six primaries. I was able to use PerfectColor to bring the reds in line and boost up what turned out to be undersaturated greens and to use the PerfecTint controls (along with our colorimeter) to make a bit of improvement (though not fully fix) the factory defaults for the primaries, some of which were off the industry standard (see Test Bench).
Meanwhile, measurements confirmed that Mitsubishi's Low 6500 color temperature setting wasn't quite 6,500 K; though its grayscale tracking fell within about 300 to 400 K at most brightness levels (average to below-average performance), it consistently leaned a bit red and was as much as 610 K off in the direction of red with a full-on white 100-IRE test pattern. A service-menu calibration brought it to within 80 K of spot-on through most of the set's brightness range. I applaud Mitsubishi for including a preset that's intended to adhere to the industry standard for grayscale, and this one was better than many we've seen, but it was still far enough off that I wouldn't want to skip the service-menu calibration. On a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being a perfect industry-standard picture, this Mits, after a basic disc calibration and subjective tuning any serious enthusiast can do at home without instruments, scores about a 7.
Along with the aforementioned color-palette controls, the WD-57831 provided a dynamic contrast option called Deep Field Imager and a SharpEdge edge-enhancement mode, both of which I deactivated after some experimentation. I also left the set's noise-reduction circuit (offering Low, Medium, and High settings) off except where needed for less-than-stellar source material.
PERFORMANCE Once I got the WD-57831 tuned up, it was pretty clear that good high-definition material — namely HD DVD and Blu-ray Disc selections — looks absolutely outstanding on this set. Colors were vivid and looked quite natural, and detail was as sharp as I've come to expect from the best 1080p rear projectors we've tested (as borne out by its resolution of test patterns).
On the HD DVD of Troy, for example, there's a scene in which Achilles (Brad Pitt) is practicing swordplay with his cousin Patroclus (Garrett Hedlund) on a series of stone patios overlooking the sea. The sandy hue of the stones looked dead-on, as did the rusty striations running throughout them, and the foliage springing up between the rocks exhibited several natural shades of green, from dark pine to bright fern. They were reproduced in strong relief against the stones, the sandy terrain of the hill leading to the pungent blue waters of the sea below, and the pale blue sky. When Achilles stops to fling a spear at an approaching group of horsemen and intentionally lands it in a tree, the close-up of the tree trunk was startling for the gobs of detail in the bark and in the sun-worn skin and fine hairs on the hand of the soldier who retrieves the spear from it.
Furthermore, the weave in Achilles' blue denim-like vest and in the black outfit worn by his apprentice were visible even when they fell into shadows cast by the bright sun — evidence of the WD-57831's fine reproduction of black and shadow detail. I threw in a challenging dark scene from M:I III in which Ethan (Tom Cruise) and Luther (Ving Rhames) seek privacy to talk in what appears to be a poorly lit attic and found that the Mitsubishi's ability to extract room details from the dark shadows behind Luther was excellent, essentially equal to that of the 58-inch HP DLP (no longer available) that we still keep on hand as one of our reference televisions.
Tossing on the Open Season Blu-ray Disc took the experience up yet another level. This is a digitally animated production, as well as the first BD from Sony Pictures to use the MPEG-4/VC-1 compression codec favored by the HD DVD camp, and the picture quality is simply breathtaking. The style of animation calls for very rich colors and ample use of highlights to give the impression of Big West sunlight bathing everything in sight, so there's tremendous dynamic contrast in every scene, and on the Mitsubishi it looked so smooth and free of anything even remotely resembling video noise that it left my mouth hanging open. During the movie's opening, when Boog the bear is traveling in the back of Ranger Beth's Jeep to his performance at the nature center, you can see the fineness of his animated fur as the wind blows through. And when the nasty hunter Shaw pulls up alongside in a parking lot, the dirt on his fingernails was clearly visible, along with the shiny nylon texture of his brown sportsman's vest.
Nonetheless, I did notice that in direct comparison with the 58-inch HP (which we keep around for its exceptional color), the Jeep's red looked a bit more orange on the Mits, and getting it closer using the PerfectColor and PerfecTint controls made Boog's brown fur unnaturally red. I can only attribute this minor aberration to differences in the two sets' color primaries, but there was never an issue with color in my other viewing on the Mits, and this wasn't something I'd even have detected without a second TV set up next to it.
If I did have one gripe about the WD-57831, it was in its handling of lower-quality program material — even the sort of lower-quality HD programming you might find on a typical overcompressed cable transmission. The set passed all the upconversion and 2:3 film cadence tests on the Silicon Optix HQV test disc. And it did great with other high-quality DVDs played back at 480i/p, as well, such as the Anniversary Edition of Apollo 13, which had the expected standard-def mosquito noise and film grain prior to engaging the TV's noise reduction, which worked quite well, smoothing the picture without sacrificing much detail. The heavily compressed SD and even HD programming commonly spewed from our Time Warner cable box could look anywhere from okay to poor, however. A Discovery HD show on the Blue Angels stunt flyers showed good detail and color on the blue uniforms and flesh tones, but a fair amount of video noise was apparent and only partially fixed by engaging the noise reduction. On a live Solomon Burke concert performance on HDNet, I noticed some distracting busyness in the dark background behind the stage (though there was tremendous detail and solidity in the musician's face and the stage props in the foreground). In an HDNet broadcast of the Peking Acrobatics troupe, blocking distortion (pixelization) was clearly discernible on the rolling projections used as a stage backdrop, and I spotted a little unexpected instability in the normally clean 720p ESPN HD SportsCenter broadcasts I watched as well. By looking at the same material on the HP (which also had its noise reduction turned off), I was able to determine that these were indeed crappy telecasts that would challenge any set. But, for whatever reason, the Mitsubishi did seem to handle them a little less elegantly.
BOTTOM LINE With its generally outstanding picture quality and excellent, well thought-out feature set, the Mitsubishi WD-57831 57-inch DLP HDTV is a top contender in its class and a tremendous value relative to any flat-panel display approaching its size. Its reproduction of poor-quality cable broadcasts left me a bit cold, but I'm afraid none of us should expect much these days from cable, especially not in midtown Manhattan or similarly dense locales where providers are forced to squeeze every last bit of capacity from their systems with low data rates and other compromises. On the other hand, when fed clean HD and even good standard-definition DVDs, the WD-57831 proved itself a movie lover's paradise — one well worth looking at again and again.
Full Lab Results
More Test Reports
Back to Homepage
What's New on S&V