A TV WATCHER'S DREAM

Hitachi’s newest plasma harbors a number of technological features to give it better picture quality than other panels. This includes VirtualHD, which can even improve regular television signals.

Forty-two-inch plasmas (measured diagonally) come in two flavors: ED and HD. No, ED is not the Bob Dole Viagra variety. It means enhanced definition and has a 480-pixel resolution (measured vertically). HD stands for high definition and must display 720 vertical pixels or higher. This panel boasts 1,024 vertical and horizontal pixels with over 2.5 times the picture detail of an ED set. Watch the image from 15 feet away or more and you won’t notice the extra pixels, but look at it from a viewing distance of six to ten feet and the additional detail makes a difference.

 
The 42HDT55 is packed with user-friendly features. Direct access to sources, for example, allows users to push one button, one time, to change inputs and functions—unlike economy brands that have only sequential access requiring multiple pushes of a button. A/V Net is another big benefit that allows any family member to control your entire system (cable box, satellite receiver, A/V surround sound, PVR, VCR, DVD and almost any other source component) from the supplied remote with easy- to-follow on-screen controls. This feature alone will go a long way toward justifying the price difference. The separate Audio-Video Control Center also sets this TVapart from low-end designs, whose panels typically require many wires to connect multiple source components to the plasma. No one wants to wall-mount a flat TV and have to hang or snake a dozen wires on or in the wall. Hitachi’s system lets you connect the components to the control center in your equipment cabinet and have only one cable running to the TV.

Hitachi routes video and audio signals to the plasma panel through the outboard component, called the A/V Control Center (above). Only a proprietary cable needs to run from it, at the equipment rack, to the display.

Besides lower resolution, "value" plasmas can suffer from a variety of picture-degrading characteristics. To optimize performance, Hitachi engineers addressed a variety of these concerns including contouring, black levels and color accuracy.

For starters, Hitachi uses 10-bit video processing to create 1,024 steps between black and white. This minimizes false contouring, which is a digital artifact that can appear as uneven shading in the picture. Analog TVs blend shades and colors smoothly, whereas digital sets have a defined number of steps of brightness and shades. If an area of the picture in an analog set is slightly darker than the adjacent area, the picture will make the transition smoothly. With digital sets that have only 256 possible steps from black to white, the picture will step to the next darker level and appear like a solarized photo. The lack of available shading really stands out in the dark picture areas of deprived designs. Competitors either bury the low-level light detail to eliminate dark area artifacts or simply hope the viewer will ignore them.

Hitachi’s set also boasts tinted, antireflective front glass that aids in making a very dark black, which gives the image more depth and dimension. Economy plasmas, by comparison, don’t make dark blacks.

In addition, Hitachi has incorporated another new circuit. Called Virtual HD, it does a fine job of displaying both low- and high-quality cable and satellite programs without the jagged lines, noise and motion aberrations that I have seen on competitors’ screens.

My favorite feature is unique to Hitachi plasmas and will be a godsend for any purchaser that is concerned about perfect color balance. It allows the user to properly balance the set’s color decoder. While most TVs tend to exaggerate the red images, their manufacturers believing that the average Joe Schmoe likes it that way, Hitachi’s set is the exception. With the aid of test patterns (available on various DVDs), the viewer can easily correct the color balance with Hitachi’s on-screen color decoder menu, yielding pictures that are vibrant yet natural-looking.

The display’s color temperature in the standard mode looks and measures near the industry reference of D6500 Kelvin. This setting produces the most-natural colors and neutral grays, greatly improving the picture’s realism. Only the darkest areas of the image have a slight blue-purple tint. A quick trip into the service menu by a qualified and properly equipped technician (me, in this case) corrects the error, revealing neutral dark grays. This is important: Not all plasmas have the necessary service adjustments to fully correct this condition.

I also viewed a variety of sources, beginning with cable television. This is the lowest-quality source, but it produces a very acceptable image on this panel that is free of the scalloped, jagged-edged pictures I see again and again in those bargain-brand plasmas. Standard 480i and progressive 480p DVD content also looks good, but I obtained the best results using a DVI-equipped (i.e., a digital connection) player that I had on hand. This picture is truly outstanding.

Throughout my evaluation process, I look for picture distortions that would distract a viewer. Occasionally I see one with my face pressed up against the glass, but at a normal viewing distance (5.5 feet and farther from the screen), it is not noticeable. I make all observations with the user controls tuned to their most-accurate settings. Turn up the color, contrast and sharpness beyond the limits of the source material on any digital display and all bets are off.

HDTV satellite and broadcast content tests the panel’s 1,024-vertical-pixel resolution. Every program looks more detailed than any other 42-inch panel I’ve seen to date. Images are sharp and clean. Both dark and light areas of the picture have amazing color, depth and detail. This is one heck of an HDTV monitor. Even the blacks are quite dark, measuring a level of just 0.08 footlambert. By comparison, low-end plasmas have black levels that exceed this measurement by more than two to three times.

With the 42HDT55’s expected retail price of $6,299 ($8,299 list price), it’s up to the prospective buyer to decide what is more important: a cheap flat display that suffers from many picture defects, or one that can be used with any source material and produces pictures that equal or surpass those of the behemoth boxed sets. For me, the choice is clear: I go with the Hitachi.