Digital Home Thoughts: A Harbinger of Things to Come: Westinghouse's LVM-37W1 LCD TV

Setup and Calibration
HD displays almost invariably need careful calibration since, as a rule, factory settings are optimized (if at all) for the store showroom. Of course, really serious video-philes use a Spider to calibrate their displays. Me, I’m an amateur so I simply switched to the THX optimizer wizard on the movie disk. The process is pretty straightforward: the wizard displays instructions and a sample screen for setting brightness, contrast, hue, and saturation. It takes a couple of minutes and then you’re back at the menu and ready to run the movie at something close to what the producers intended.

Out of the box, the movie looked very good, even from two feet away, with no pixilation or fuzziness. After the wizard it looked noticeably better. Jaw-droppingly good, in fact. I tweaked the brightness a bit higher out of personal preference and I wrote down the values of the settings to replicate them later on the other inputs (XBOX, VCR, networked media receiver, etc). It has a lot of ports but I need every last one of them.

Later, I hooked up the cable STB, switch from DVI2 to DVI1 and run the box’s own setup wizard to switch it from 480i to 1080i. Initially, I set it up in pass-through mode so it outputs the native resolution of the individual channel/show. Then I replicated the DVI-1 display settings and went channel surfing for a good subject. Luckily INHD was running a travelogue; HD video tape at 1080i. (Venice is a pretty city. I want to go see it in person some day.) I eventually remembered to breathe and moved on.

The plan was to run the display non-stop for as close to 24 hours as possible, then let it lie for as close to 24 hours as possible. If the power supply lived through that it would live through anything I’d ever demand of it. Which it did.

Lesson 2: Dual-pass upscaling really helps.
Since the display has a Faroudja DCDi adaptive motion video processing chip, everything gets upscaled, even 1080i inputs. And, given the same source material (i.e., a DVD) at 480, 720, or 1080, the 1080 version looks visibly better. Just a bit in some cases. But it is noticeable.

Lesson 3: Resolution does matter.
Image quality depends on content. Fuzzy analog SD will look fuzzy at any display resolution. But for clean digital content, resolution does matter: 480p looks great... 720p is fantastic... 1080 is still better, though.
At the store the display was being fed a standard showroom loop of different resolution content. And I could tell what source material was 720 and what was 1080. And both looked better on the LVM-37W1 than the comparable 37” 720p/768p LCD displays. Pixel density does matter.

Lesson 4: Size Matters
Simply put: HD displays can and should be viewed at significantly closer distances than comparable-height SD displays. And this allows for viewing a larger display in the same room. My old TV was a 27” and I was a bit concerned that anything bigger than 32” would be too big to watch at reasonable distances. What I found is that the meaning of display size is different at 1080p. In SD terms, a 37” display is big and can’t really be watched any closer than about 8 feet. In 1080p terms, however, it is medium-sized and can be watched at 5 feet range or closer depending on how immersive you want to get. I ended up moving my viewing position in about two feet or so. I could have moved in even closer, since the thing is usable as a PC gaming monitor at desktop distances; 18 inches and less; but 37” at 6-7 feet is exactly right for my living room.