Along with basic settings in the Picture Adjust menu, an item labeled Energy Saver Mode lets you adjust the TV's backlight level to achieve deeper blacks. And when the set is in Theater mode, a Theater Pro II submenu provides access to an extended range of adjustments not available in the other picture presets, including red, green, and blue color temperature, as well as separate horizontal and vertical sharpness adjustments (indispensable for reducing edge enhancement during setup). Turning on the TV's Color Management setting also gives you additional controls to tweak the level and hue of red, green, yellow, and cyan separately from the main color and hue adjustments. But with the exception of the red level adjustment, I found these controls to be largely ineffective, and JVC's manual didn't shed any light.

Performance With the 47X898's Theater mode optimized for my Blu-ray Disc player, I took a look at the recent release of A Few Good Men. I'm not a fan of courtroom dramas, but this disc's crisp, eye-popping picture held my attention when screened on the JVC. In the scene where Lt. Kaffee (Tom Cruise) and Lt. Cdr. Galloway (Demi Moore) first plead their case opposite Capt. Ross (Kevin Bacon), each actor's skin tone looked natural and also showed subtle variations in hue. Overall, the colors in both this movie and other programs I watched looked vivid. Too vivid, as it turned out: I needed to adjust the set's red level in the Color Management menu to tone down the red stripes on the courtroom's American flag, which bordered on garish.

From my normal 8-foot seating distance, the TV's 47-inch screen proved to be on the small side for fully appreciating 1080p pictures. Even so, its crisp resolution brought out details like individual strands of hair in Bacon's buzz cut (ouch!). In all of the courtroom scenes, I found the depth of the black uniforms worn by Kaffee's legal team to be striking. Not only did they look solid, but lighter black shades were readily apparent in the folds and creases. And the JVC's fully fleshed-out shadows also held up in a dark scene where Lt. Col. Markinson (J.T. Walsh) surprises Kaffee when he's driving downtown at night.

Standard-def DVDs and cable TV also looked very good on the JVC - a testament to its solid deinterlacing and upconversion. However, I noticed that the set's Natural Cinema mode needed to be switched from Auto to On to reliably upconvert 1080i high-def programs. Picture uniformity was outstanding for an LCD model: There was no sign of uneven screen brightness on dark movie scenes, and pictures showed equally strong contrast and consistent colors at 45° off-axis as they did when viewed head-on.

Bottom Line JVC's LT-47X898 delivers great-looking pictures with both standard- and high-def sources and an exceptionally wide viewing angle - the best of any LCD set I've yet tested. My only reservation is its limited options for picture adjustment, which fall short compared with other high-end TVs on the market. Even so, this is the first LCD I've used that proved virtually free of all the technology's shortcomings (motion lag, shadow-depth weakness, picture non-uniformity, you name it). If that's not high praise, I don't know what is.

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