OTHER TECH

This might seem like an "everything including the kitchen sink" category, but picture uniformity covers important aspects of a TV's performance that can fly under the radar when you're in the store drooling over its high-def images. A world of 24/7 high-def programming is definitely coming, but in the meantime we need our HDTVs to do a solid job of "upconverting" the lower-res standard-def pictures from DVD players, VCRs, standard-def cable boxes, satellite receivers, and hard-disk recorders. Picture uniformity also includes screen uniformity, or the evenness of the image at various points across the screen; viewing angle, which is how well a set retains its brightness and color from off-center seats; and whether or not it introduces "artifacts" - blemishes in the picture that may be peculiar to a particular technology.

Both sets delivered solid-looking pictures with standard-def (480i) sources. But pictures on the DLP looked soft viewed side by side with the LCD. Going straight to the first battle scene in Master and Commander - a killer test for false contours (which show up mostly as coarse, unnatural patches or bands in shadowy scenes) - both DK and I noted that the pictures looked smoother on the LCD as the ship sailed through the fog. The DLP's picture looked patchy in comparison.

Single-chip DLP systems that use a rapidly spinning filter wheel to create full-color images are prone to something called "rainbows" - quick flashes of colored light on the edge of sharp transitions from black to white. While each of us saw several rainbows, they weren't frequent enough to be distracting (and some viewers may never notice them at all).

LCD, meanwhile, is prone to the "screen-door effect," a gridlike texture that appears mostly in light images on flat areas of color. It occurs when the LCD panel's pixel structure is magnified by the TV's projection lens, and it will be less noticeable if you sit farther away from the TV. Screen-door effect can also be an issue with DLP TVs, but it tends to be a bigger problem with LCD because LCD panels must run their electrical connections in the spaces between the pixels, resulting in wider spacing than their DLP cousins of similar size and pixel count. At our 8-foot viewing distance - a good span for this screen size - it wasn't apparent on the Samsung. But DK and I could see a faint grid at various times on the Hitachi.

Programs with poor video quality on analog cable channels can sometimes trip up an otherwise impressive TV. In a billiards match on ESPN, the green surface of a table looked patchy and soft on the DLP compared with the LCD, which did a better job with "noisy" programs. But with higher-quality sources, the DLP's picture showed excellent uniformity, with consistent brightness and color at all points across its screen. The LCD's image looked brighter at the center of the screen than at the sides and corners, an effect known as hotspotting. It got worse when the image was viewed from off center, but it was primarily visible on test patterns and difficult to detect with movies. The DLP was uniformly bright up to 30° off center.

While you should keep an eye out for the LCD screen-door effect and DLP rainbows when shopping for a big-screen TV, other performance aspects like upconversion and viewing angle vary from set to set, so we can't stamp them as DLP- or LCD-related issues. When all the aspects of picture uniformity were taken into account, the result was a draw.