You rarely used to hear the words “HDTV” and “bargain” in the same sentence, but times are changing fast. While the stickers affixed to LCD and plasma sets, or LCD and DLP (Digital Light Processing) projection TVs, still hover in the multithousand dollar range, and the commissioned salespeople at electronics stores suddenly all seem to be driving new cars, the lowly old cathode-ray tube (CRT) quietly delivers outstanding value. The latest crop of direct-view CRT sets is no exception, like the three modestly priced TVs reviewed here — Toshiba's 32HF73 ($1,099), Samsung's TX-P2670WH ($700) and Sony's KV-30HS420 ($999), all available “on the streeet” for less than these list prices.
All three can display high-definition sources as well as progressive- scan DVD, and the Samsung even has a built-in HDTV tuner. None of their screens are big enough to show the full detail of HDTV, but their medium-size pictures make a good compromise for apartments and small dens, or even large living rooms where the TV isn't the focal point. The Toshiba is the only one with a standard squarish 4:3 aspect-ratio screen, but its 29-inch (diagonal) letterboxed widescreen picture actually measures 3 inches larger than the Samsung's and is only an inch smaller than the Sony's. If you watch more TV than movies, 4:3 still makes sense, but if you want to make the most of DVDs or HDTV, consider going wide.
PDF: Features ChecklistPDF: In the Lab
Toshiba 32HF73
This Toshiba set looks much like any other flat-tube TV. Silver plastic surrounds the 32-inch (diagonal) screen, perforated by speaker holes to the left and right. Flipping open a hatch behind the TheaterView HD logo reveals an A/V input with S-video, and closing it again restores the TV's clean look. The six buttons on the front are useful — except Demo, which causes the set to dance through its menus.
The remote control has a nice size, backlit buttons, the ability to control three other pieces of A/V gear, and a relatively logical layout. But to switch inputs you have to hit the TV/Video button, awkwardly placed at the top.
There's an aspect-ratio (display mode) control — something many 4:3 TVs lack. Normal mode fills the screen with 4:3 programs, Compression places black bars above and below widescreen DVD or HDTV pictures, and Zoom expands the letterboxed movies shown on standard cable channels like AMC or TCM. The first two choices also work with high-def sources.
The Toshiba's back panel has a DVI (Digital Visual Interface) input and two component-video inputs so you can connect up to three HDTV or progressive-scan sources. Being able to save separate picture settings for each video input is a nice touch, as is the split-screen feature, which works with all inputs and sources except DVI and allowed me to resize a pair of images in up to nine ways.
|
PICTURE QUALITY After tweaking the picture, I slipped Kill Bill, Vol. 1 into the DVD player. Chapter 3 begins with a terrific fight between The Bride (Uma Thurman) and Copperhead (Vivica A. Fox). As the women punched, wrestled, and threw one another around, I quickly realized that the detail I was used to seeing on DVD wasn't quite there. Thurman's face and leather jacket looked a little soft in all but the closeups. And as she held Copperhead off with a knife, wisps of hair in her ponytail, which should have been crisply defined, blended into a blonde mist. I also had to reduce the color control to compensate for the way the TV accentuated reds, which caused the vibrant décor of Copperhead's house to lose some of its luster.
Like other CRT-based TVs I've seen, including the others here, the Toshiba did a better job with dark scenes than most DLP, LCD, and plasma TVs. During the huge fight scene toward the end of the movie, The Bride enters a room filled with sword-wielding yakuzas and someone kills the lights. In the dim blue glow I could see facial expressions, different parts of the yakuzas' black suits, and the cross-hatch pattern on a katana's hilt — all while the letterbox bars and most other parts of the widescreen image remained an inky black.
To test the set's high-def performance, I checked out a T-Wolves/Lakers game on TNT's HDTV channel. Compared with the other sets here, the Toshiba's rendition was a bit soft. Don't get me wrong: HDTV still looked much better than standard television, and I could see plenty of extra detail, from the grain in the wood floor to the names on the jerseys. But HDTV should also look better than DVD, and on the Toshiba it looked the same. In the shuttle launches from both the high-def 1080i D-VHS tape and DVD versions of Digital Video Essentials , details looked identical.
Given its standard 4:3 screen, playing widescreen material like DVDs and HDTV programs isn't the 32HF73's strong suit. But standard TV fills its screen well, so it's a natural choice for people who want to watch HDTV, but currently watch mostly news shows and other nonwidescreen programs.
PDF: Features Checklist
PDF: In the Lab
Samsung TX-P2670WH
At only 26 inches (diagonal), the screen on Samsung's TX-P2670WH looks Lilliputian next to those on other widescreen tube HDTVs. Although the silver plastic frame around the screen is relatively slim, the TV's design is pretty conservative overall. A thin, rounded bar that runs across almost the entire front of the cabinet camouflages a row of control keys and makes the outsized power button look even more prominent.
|
As with the other two sets, the Samsung's remote cuts a few corners to hit its price. None of the buttons are backlit, but at least the layout was simple enough to learn by touch. Switching inputs was slower than usual and required me to cycle through all seven of them (there's no way to disable unused jacks). But I did appreciate the dedicated buttons for the component/DVI and antenna inputs. The remote can control external Samsung HDTV tuners and other brands of VCRs, cable boxes, and DVD players. A slide-down door hides lesser-used keys, and four colored buttons give direct access to important functions like picture adjustments and display modes.
The Samsung offers five display-mode choices, including a pair of Zooms and a Panorama mode that stretches the sides of the picture more than the middle. I could use two of them when watching high-def sources: the standard widescreen mode and the 4:3 mode, which places black bars to either side of a standard-shaped TV picture. This last mode is useful since some high-def broadcasts are basically “stretched” versions of standard programs that need to be “unstretched” to look right. Still, the screen's 4:3 image is only 21 inches diagonal.
Along with being able to choose among three picture presets, I could also customize picture parameters like contrast, brightness, and color for each input. Besides the DVI input, the back panel has a pair of component-video inputs, but only one S-video input — a second S-video input is on the side panel, toward the front.
PICTURE QUALITY I connected my DVD player to one of the component inputs and sat back for another look at Kill Bill, Vol. 1 . After I tweaked the picture, the Samsung set seemed to share many of the performance characteristics of the Toshiba, and watching the movie again confirmed it.
The biggest issue was the tendency to accentuate red. (Tarantino, who toned down the red of the blood in Kill Bill to avoid an NC-17 rating, would probably prefer that you watch his flick on a set like this one.) To my eye, the colors looked garish. Thurman's face, as she pulled her half-paralyzed body across the seats of the hospital orderly's pickup truck, was the color of a crabapple, so I turned the color control way down. This naturally made other colors — like the yellow truck and the blue of her dressing gown — too pale, but it helped make skin tones realistic.
As the camera alternated between extreme closeups of Thurman's feet and face, all the detail I expected to see was there. Tiny lines in her skin, barely visible freckles, and whorls in her gray eyes looked captivating close up, and the signs of chapping on her lips made her recent ordeal seem that much more immediate. While you have to sit fairly close to feel any sense of visual immersion with a TV this small, I could see lots of detail even from 6 feet away.
Next I fired up the D-VHS deck to test DVD vs. HDTV image quality. The amount of detail visible in the shuttle launch sequences on the high-def tape version of Digital Video Essentials was roughly equal to that on the DVD. But that's normal for a tube of this size. Turning to a recording from the satellite receiver, I still enjoyed the beauty of ESPN's high-def SportsCenter , or at least the studio shots, because all the highlights — including the previous night's high-def basketball game — were in standard-definition. The wide shot of the deserted Palace at Auburn Hills looked great, although on a bigger TV the seats in the deep background would have stood out instead of blending together.
In the end, the joys of this little Samsung were its wide screen, built-in high-def tuner, and affordable price. If you can sit close enough without straining your eyes, and like to watch widescreen DVD movies and HDTV shows, it's an incredible value.
PDF: Features Checklist
PDF: In the Lab
Sony KV-30HS420
The 30-inch KV-30HS420 is Sony's smallest widescreen tube TV, but at 150 pounds and nearly 2 feet deep, it's still massive by today's shrinking-set standards. Plenty of silver plastic surrounds the flat tube, and the fuselage curves gently along the top edge, contrasting with the sharp angles at the bottom. Unlike the Toshiba and Samsung sets, the Sony doesn't display an HDTV logo.
A slightly redesigned remote preserves Sony's characteristically thoughtful ergonomic design, although the only illumination consists of glow-in-the-dark number and channel keys. Secondary keys are rightly relegated to the top of the wand, and the numeric keypad gets prominence. Repeatedly pressing the TV/Video button is the only way to switch between sources, but I did appreciate the option to skip unused inputs. The remote can command two other devices, namely a cable/satellite receiver and a VCR or DVD player.
The well-designed menus include some nice touches, such as text explanations of individual items and a separate screen section that lets you set a default display mode for sources with a 4:3 aspect ratio. The four display modes include one to stretch the sides more than the middle and a Zoom mode that lets you adjust the stretching and cropping. It was frustrating, though, that I couldn't change modes at all with high-def sources.
|
You can adjust the four picture presets to suit your tastes, but they aren't associated with individual inputs. For example, if you optimize one preset for your DVD player, you'll have to remember to call it up manually when you switch to the player's input.
Unlike more-expensive HDTVs, the KV-30HS420 can't display two pictures side by side, and it doesn't have a digital tuner built in, so you can't get high-def channels simply by connecting it to an external antenna. But Sony's bean counters couldn't have picked a better pair of features to eliminate — picture in picture (PIP) and picture out of picture (POP) are hardly necessities, and most people get high-def from cable or satellite anyway.
Sony did add a healthy back panel, however, including a pair of component-video inputs and an HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) port. The latter, which will replace DVI as the Hollywood-approved high-def input, accepts a digital signal from similarly equipped DVD players and HDTV tuners. It can also work with DVI-equipped gear if you use an adapter.
PICTURE QUALITY I tested the Sony's prowess with Kill Bill, Vol. 1 using the component-video inputs, and things looked good indeed. As with the Toshiba and Samsung sets, it accentuated reds, so I reduced the color control to compensate. Even so, the delicate tones on Uma Thurman's face came through as she struggled to restore life to her toe. And most other colors — like the pickup truck's stark crimson seats, the yellow door frame, and even the pale blue of Thurman's hospital clothes — remained rich.
The Sony delivered every dot of detail in this scene as well as in every other DVD I tried. I could make out tiny textures and faint stitching on the white kimono worn by Oh-Ren Ishii (Lucy Lui) and later the powdery flakes of fake-looking snow. Shadow detail was also excellent. As Oh-Ren muses over the make of Thurman's sword, the side of her face disappeared gradually into her hair, and her pupils were easily distinguishable from her dark irises. Because the Sony did a better job of maintaining a consistent black than the other two TVs, I could set brightness lower for deeper blacks and not worry about losing detail in dark areas.
When I repeated my test of high-def resolution using the shuttle launch on Digital Video Essentials , the Sony delivered more detail than the other two sets — as I expected given its larger widescreen image size. Watching the 1080i D-VHS tape, I noticed extra detail in the vertical lines on the shuttle's nosecone. The sharpness also made a big difference during a high-def basketball game on TNT, letting me see the intense expressions of the assistant coaches.
With its razor-sharp detail, the Sony was definitely the picture-quality champ among these three sets. Add the first-rate remote, flexible setup options, and stylish design, and you have an excellent low-cost way to experience HDTV.
PDF: Features Checklist
PDF: In the Lab