JVC's previous-generation HD-ILA sets also exhibited discolorations in white fields, and while this set improves upon that fault immensely, its picture is still not as uniform across the screen as on the best DLP models I've seen. As the front half of the droid ship plunged through Coruscant's clouds, for example, I saw a faint hint of yellow discoloration along the right edge of the screen and an even fainter reddish tint in the corners. But to be fair, these discolorations were totally invisible in most situations.

Turning next to HDNet from my Dish Network DVR-942 satellite receiver, I watched the Harvard vs. Yale football game. The suberb detail of the 1080i HDTV picture was obvious from the first close-up of the announcers' craggy faces on the huge screen, and during the pregame I saw row upon row of crisply defined (albeit empty) bleachers in the background. If you're counting, the JVC HD-70FH96 is one of the few 1080p HDTVs I've reviewed that can actually resolve every line of a high-def 1080i test pattern.

In the afternoon sun the field took on a deep, natural green, and other colors appeared equally accurate. While field-side reporter Kandace Kruger's face certainly had its share of makeup, made obvious in HD, her skin tone looked even and wasn't tinged with too much red. The sky faded smoothly from deep blue toward the top to near-white along the horizon, with minimal noise and no hint of false contouring - the jarring stairstep gradations between dark and light areas that plague some digital televisions.

BOTTOM LINE It's hard to sweat the small stuff when an HDTV performs as well as the JVC HD-70FH96. This giant HDTV manages to combine the high resolution of 1080p with most of the other characteristics that make a great-looking image. Its biggest shortcomings - a clunky user interface and the couple of missing features noted above - shouldn't deter anybody who values picture quality above all else.