The flat-panel plasma form factor represents the aesthetic ideal of TV design. That inches-thin, “all picture” look coaxes men and women alike to open their checkbooks and pay significantly more than they would for a bulky rear-projection TV with the same size screen.
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RCA Scenium's HD61THW263, a 61-inch rear-projection HDTV that's part of the company's Profiles line, may not use plasma technology, but it looks a lot like a plasma TV. In partnership with projector maker InFocus (which offers a similar set under its own brand), RCA has shoehorned a DLP (Digital Light Processing) rear-projection assembly into a chassis that measures just under 7 inches deep. That's 3 inches deeper than a typical plasma set, but it's also half as deep as a typical DLP rear-projection TV.
RCA and InFocus accomplished this magic by using a super wide-angle projection lens and mounting the light engine off-center, thereby shortening the path between the screen and the lamp. The design also uses a special screen that bends the steeply angled beam from the light engine back to a proper orientation for viewing.
When I saw the $9,999 list price of the HD61THW263, I wondered who it was aimed at. For a few more grand you can buy a 61-inch plasma set that won't have a big chunk of cabinet below the screen. But some buyers are wary of plasma's reliability — unlike DLP, LCD, and LCoS (liquid crytal on silicon) sets, plasmas are susceptible to “burn in” if you leave a bright, stationary image onscreen for a long time. To me, burn-in is an exaggerated problem, and there are many ways to avoid it. Nonetheless, this RCA Scenium set has many perks besides burn-in immunity to justify its price.
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SETUP When the HDTV emerged from its box and stood before me in Sound & Vision's video lab, I couldn't help muttering “sa-weeet” under my breath. Seen from head-on, it's a huge, jet-black rectangle framed on the sides and bottom by milky-silver contoured plastic. From the side (see photo below), the TV is remarkably slim and can be hung on the wall using the optional mounting bracket ($549).
Instead, our review sample came with an unobtrusive matching stand (not shown, a $249 option). This didn't bring the TV up quite high enough, so I'd recommend using another stand or else adding a riser a foot or so high for eye-level watching. I plugged my gear into the amply endowed input bay on the lefthand side. A removable cover hides the jacks from sight.
The smartly designed learning remote has blue-backlit buttons, and its finger-friendly cursor pad made a satisfying click when I pressed OK. Unfortunately, the keys are a little too small, so it's hard to make out their cryptic labels in the dark. After I powered it up via the remote, the RCA took about 25 seconds to reach full brightness (powering down took about 40 seconds before the whisper-quiet fan ceased spinning).
In addition to a CableCARD slot and an HDMI (High Definition Multimedia Interface) input, the back panel also has two DT-VLink (FireWire) inputs, which I usually ignore since few electronics devices aside from camcorders use them. RCA, however, offers a pair of HDTV-capable digital video recorders as options so you can record high-def programs TiVo-style. These connect to the FireWire ports and are identical except for capacity, offering 80-gigabyte ($449) and 160-GB ($549) hard-disk drives, for up to 9 and 18 hours of high-def recording, respectively. A neat option.
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The setup menus offer a few unique options and excellent explanations of each function (I barely had to crack the manual). For example, I could customize the colors and degree of transparency of the menus themselves as well as set picture parameters (contrast, brightness, and so on) and a default display mode for each input. The set allows four display modes for standard-definition 480i (interlaced) and enhanced-definition 480p (progressive-scan) sources, but only one for HDTV. The picture-in-picture control was likewise limited. It worked fine with regular TV, placing a small inset window anywhere I liked on the screen, but it couldn't display progressive-scan or high-def sources inside the window.
PICTURE QUALITY Even before calibrating the set (see “in the lab,” below), I was impressed by the relative accuracy of the Professional and Cinematic picture presets. I chose Professional, which defeated the Contrast Expand feature to provide full shadow detail and got the TV reasonably close to peak home theater performance.
Being too picky for “reasonably close,” however, I made a few more tweaks before killing the lights and settling in to watch the Kill Bill, Vol. 2 DVD. The text of the credits looked characteristically (for a DLP TV) razor-sharp and stable. I also quickly noticed another DLP calling card — the rainbow effect. The pastor's white shirt in the wedding rehearsal, for example, trailed very brief bursts of red, green and blue as I looked away and then back again. Most viewers won't notice rainbows, though.
In the black-and-white opening scene, I was very impressed by how the shadowy areas and gray backgrounds graduated smoothly to a deep, satisfying black. Bill's boots, for example, looked inky and glossy, and his dark suit showed no trace of false contours — blocky patches of video noise that show up in shadowy scenes on some digital sets. Details were sharp and lifelike. I especially enjoyed the closeup face-off between Bill (David Carradine) and The Bride (Uma Thurman) on the porch of the chapel. His craggy skin stood out in stark relief.
Color returned in the following scene of painted hills, whose varying blues, browns, and reds looked great. My testing had revealed the set's tendency to slightly de-accentuate red and green, so I turned the color control up to compensate. The Bride's face ran a realistic gamut from pale to ruddy with rage and fear throughout the movie — but blues were a little too intense, as in the strip club's lighting.
Next I turned to high-def from the Dish satellite receiver. CBS's broadcast of the U.S. Open tennis tournament looked, as I expected, incredible. I got a great sense of the speed given the ball by Roger Federer's forehand as he rolled over a hapless Tim Henman, and I could make out every face in the crowd. The onscreen graphics looked rock-solid in both 720p and 1080i modes, and the green swath of court was noise-free.
The RCA was capable of showing every dot of detail in 720p high-def programs, a feat that, surprisingly, some “native 720p” sets cannot match. With test patterns, the picture was noisier via component video than HDMI — digital test signals were reproduced impeccably. Although I couldn't detect any of that noise in the high-def programs I watched, I'd still recommend feeding the HD61THW263 via its digital connections whenever possible.
BOTTOM LINE When I first heard about this TV's radical design, I expected image quality to suffer as a result of the optical tricks required to shrink cabinet depth to a little more than half a foot. To my surprise, the loss of all that depth didn't appear to affect the picture at all — the TV behaved as a high-end DLP set should. And “high-end” is the operative term. At ten grand many shoppers will be comparing this RCA HDTV to a 61-inch plasma, not a DLP set. But its exceedingly clean picture, with really dark blacks, is better than that of any like-sized plasma TV I've seen.
In the Lab
Color temperature (Professional preset before/Personal after calibration)
Low window (20-IRE) .............. 6,664/6,605 K
High window (80-IRE) ............. 6,146/6,323 K
Brightness (100-IRE window before/after calibration) 37.1/40.2 ftL
The Low color-temperature preset yielded a good grayscale out of the box, but the RCA slightly emphasized blue at the low end of the scale and red as brightness increased. After calibration, the brighter areas were closer to the NTSC standard of 6,500 K, although the trend of bluer shadows and redder highlights remained. Peak brightness was excellent before and after calibration.
The set produced the full range of black to white through both its component-video and HDMI inputs at all resolutions. The Contrast Expand feature seemed to sink black level, so I left it off. The set maintained a fairly consistent level of black, although not as consistently as some DLP TVs I've seen. Color decoding was below average — according to the Avia test DVD, greens and reds were de-accentuated by about 20%. Geometry was not perfect — the extreme upper right and left corners bent outward slightly, and there was very minor bowing across the screen. Off-angle viewing was very good to the sides and average from the top and bottom. Brightness was slightly less uniform than I'd expect in a DLP TV.
— D.K.