You know your life is out of balance when the best looking thing around you is the TV — and it’s not even turned on! That was the predicament I found myself in when reviewing the Loewe (pronounced “Loo-va”) Aconda widescreen HDTV monitor. Maybe the set looks so good because Europeans (Loewe is based in Germany) have an evolved design sense. Or maybe it’s because in a market dominated by giants like Sony, RCA, and Mitsubishi, a newcomer to these shores like Loewe needs to go the extra mile to grab your attention. Whatever the reason, the Aconda looks more like a sculpture than an appliance, which is a possible reason for its hefty $5,000 price tag.
The direct-view Aconda has a 38-inch (diagonal) picture tube. This makes it the largest widescreen direct-view TV available now that RCA’s popular F38310, which had the same size screen (in fact, the same picture tube), has been discontinued. Like the RCA, the Aconda has a curved rather than flat screen surface, so you’ll need to carefully control lighting conditions in your room to avoid onscreen glare.
Aconda sets are available in standard matte-black or optional metallic or piano-black finishes. My review sample was the metallic model, which, depending on lighting conditions and your viewing angle, has a luminous color fluctuating between silver and gold. Other than a raised ellipse with an infrared (IR) window, its sleek front surface is devoid of features. The ellipse flips open to reveal a full set of A/V inputs, a headphone jack, and buttons to turn the set on and switch channels. Inputs on its rear panel include one set of wideband component-video jacks and one VGA input, which can be used to connect either an HDTV tuner or a computer.
The Aconda’s audio features are fairly extensive compared with most TVs. Two 12-watt amplifier channels power its four speakers, and it has output jacks to connect an additional pair of speakers. In addition to both variable- and fixed-level stereo outputs, the set has a built-in analog-to-digital converter and a coaxial digital audio output, which you can use to connect the TV to your A/V receiver’s digital input.
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KEY FEATURES |
Loewe's helpful onscreen guide leads you through the initial setup. You select what type of component you want to connect to the TV and what kind of video signal format it delivers -- S-video, component-video 480i (interlaced), component-video 480p (progressive), or component-video 1080i -- and then the guide directs you where to plug in. After you're done, pressing the input-selection button on the remote control displays an onscreen list containing only the components you've hooked up -- a nice touch that saves time when you're toggling through inputs. You can also relabel inputs with names like Game, DVD, or "HD RGB 1080i."
The Aconda's sleek remote control lacks a backlit keypad, but it has a clean button layout and can be programmed to operate a VCR, cable box, and satellite receiver. It features a disc-shaped central control pad that you use to change channels, adjust volume, and navigate menus. There are only a few other control buttons on the remote. At top there's a line of buttons, including one to adjust the TV's video settings. Pressing this lets you tweak the picture on the fly without having to burrow through several layers of onscreen menus. Other buttons allow you to enter or exit menus, play with picture-in-picture functions, and switch the set's display formats, which include 4:3 and 16:9 plus a number of zoom and stretch modes.
When adjusting the Aconda's picture controls, the adjustments you make for each of its inputs are automatically stored in memory. You can create custom settings or choose from a list of presets, which include Normal, Day, Night, and NTSC Standard. I found that the NTSC Standard setting delivered good image quality in dim lighting -- which is how you should be watching movies anyway. In addition to knocking contrast and sharpness down to optimal levels, the NTSC mode engaged the Medium color-temperature setting, which measured reasonably close to the 6,500-K standard.
In the new DVD release of Tombstone (Walt Disney Home Video) — one of my favorite reference laserdiscs back in the day — there was a consistently high degree of shadow detail visible in both dark interior shots and ones lit by bright afternoon sunlight. For example, in a scene where Wyatt Earp and crew have their final deadly faceoff with the cowboy gang, I could detect differences in tone between the black suits worn by Wyatt and his men — and even noticed that one suit contained pinstripes, a detail I’d never seen before.
The Loewe rendered the colors in Tombstone in a vivid yet clean manner. In a scene where a bright red wagon rolls across a dusty street, its wheels and the fabric hanging from its canopy looked positively brilliant. But the Medium color-temperature preset was far enough off from the standard that flesh tones were exaggerated. For example, when a doctor warns the bedridden Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer) to mend his drinking, gambling, and night-owl ways, the first shot is a closeup of his girlfriend’s anxious face. Her skin looked slightly flushed on the Loewe screen, with a distinct red-orange cast. When the camera finally settled on Doc, the sickly sharpshooter’s mug had a similar hue.
After I made grayscale adjustments in the set’s service menu (see “in the lab”), flesh tones looked more natural. When I watched this scene again, the woman’s pale, almost chalky complexion came through, while Doc’s corpse-like pallor served to dramatically offset his bruised lips and red-rimmed eyes. My visit to the service menu also allowed me to shut off the set’s scan-velocity modulation (SVM) circuit, although the effects of SVM were very mild beforehand and could only be seen in shots where a figure was superimposed against a clear blue sky.
The Aconda’s built-in line doubler features a Film mode to convert 480i images to progressive scan with 2:3 pulldown. There are two settings, Normal and Super. I didn’t see much of a difference between them when watching movies — both provided sharp, stable, and solid-looking images. Like a few other TVs with built-in line doublers I’ve tested, however, its performance was slow and uneven compared with my reference progressive-scan DVD player. For example, in the opening of Chapter 8 in Dragonheart, where the camera does a crane move along a fortress, some stairstep artifacts were briefly visible but just as quickly disappeared.
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Anyone looking at the Loewe as a potential direct-view set for watching HDTV won’t be disappointed. Because the set’s 38-inch tube offers more square inches of screen area than 34-inch models — which are more common — high-def programs look a bit more dramatic and detailed. Watching a D-Theater demo tape with JVC’s high-def capable D-VHS VCR hooked up to the Aconda (see report on page 60) was a thoroughly mesmerizing experience. The set did an ex cellent job of rendering the wide range of desert hues in a sequence shot in Utah’s Monument Valley. Deep, smoky reds and browns, subtle pastel-toned pinks, greens, and blues — they were all there for the eyes to drink in. Looking at a different sequence shot in the American South, I could discern fine strands of fiber billowing out in close-up shots of cotton plants. Hopefully, all video images will look this good some day.
With its large screen and styling that makes most TVs look homely in comparison, the Loewe Aconda is an excellent option for anyone who wants a widescreen direct-view HDTV monitor that stands out from the pack. While it’s true that most direct-view sets now feature flat tubes, I found the Aconda’s curved screen to be an acceptable tradeoff for its few extra inches. Everything that I watched on the Loewe set — high-def satellite programs, widescreen DVDs, the evening news, a VHS tape of Monster Trucks — looked great, and I also appreciated the set’s elegant interface and clean remote control. It’ll be sad to see the Aconda leave my austere environment, but maybe then life will once again seem balanced.
In The Lab
Color temperature
(Low setting before/after calibration)
low window NA/6,486 K
high window 7,184/6,506 K
Brightness
(before/after calibration) 22.3 /20.7 ftL
With its Medium color-temperature preset selected, the Loewe Aconda measured reasonably close to the NTSC color standard on the high-window test pattern from Ovation Software’s Avia DVD, but the low-window pattern was off the measurement scale. After calibration, the TV measured 6,500 K at both ends of the grayscale, tracking within 500 K at each 10-IRE increment, which is a little below average performance. (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.)
Resolution with DVD test patterns measured the maximum 540 lines for the format. The TV’s ability to hold black was excellent, and its color decoder was very accurate. Focus was slightly soft at the corners of the screen, but picture geometry was excellent, and overscan was a better than average 2% on all sides. With a composite-video connection, a few dot-crawl artifacts were visible between the bars on an SMPTE color-bars pattern, indicating only average performance from the set’s digital comb filter. Of course, it would be something of a crime to use a composite-video connection with this TV. — A.G