OTHER TECH

PERFORMANCE Many criteria go into making a subjective evaluation of a TV's performance, but the Big Four are Color Balance, Detail, Black Depth/Contrast, and Shadow Detail. These characteristics are measured during the objective part of our evaluation, and the measurements ultimately go far toward shaping our subjective impressions.

Comments on Color Balance deal with the TV's ability to display a natural-looking range of colors. In particular, we look closely at skin-tone rendition and color saturation, or the richness of a specific hue, such as red or green, relative to other colors. Discussion of Detail covers the set's ability to display the full resolution contained in both standard- and high-def program formats, as well as how sharp those programs look when routed through the set's various video inputs. Black Depth and Contrast observations describe how dark the deepest shadows on the TV's screen appear, as well as how punchy and bright the highlights in pictures come across. Both characteristics can vary widely depending on the overall brightness level of programs, so we evaluate their consistency with a range of material. Lastly, comments on Shadow Detail focus on the TV's ability to show a range of dark gray steps in shadowy parts of pictures - particularly in dark scenes, which pose the biggest challenge to TVs.

Moving beyond the Big Four in the Performance section, we come to some more nitpicky points that also require scrutiny. Discussion of Uniformity describes the TV's ability to display pictures with even brightness levels at all points on the screen, as well as the screen's relative freedom from unnatural-looking color tints. Both issues are ones we've encountered mainly with LCD and LCoS models, though they're hardly exclusive to those technologies. Comments on Motion Rendition usually involve Video Processing - the set's performance when scaling both lower-rez material such as DVDs as well as 1080i (interlaced) high-def programs to the screen's native progressive pixel display. There's plenty that can go wrong during this process, often resulting in a softening of the picture or the introduction of jagged-looking artifacts on edge transitions. The final observations in the Performance section usually involve the set's noise-reduction processing - how effective it was in retaining detail when clearing up grainy-looking images.