Jamie Wilson of Overture Audio/Video in Wil-mington, Delaware performed a color-temperature calibration on the Loewe Articos 55. He found that, out of the box, the Loewe's color-temperature settings were on a severe bell curve. At the low end, they began at the NTSC standard of 6500 kelvins, then escalated to 20,000K before falling back to 8300K. Before calibration, not surprisingly, white fields were strikingly blue. After calibration, I found that white fields were not uniform. White fields on test pages were brighter and bluer at the bottom than at the top.

On a test pattern showing a field of white dots on a black field, the dots were never round—some were fat, perfectly formed dashes; others looked like a cartoon figure with a round body and a small round head. A crosshatch test pattern showed that Loewe has done a relatively good job of avoiding stair-step errors on diagonal lines. (A press release for the Articos 55 says it includes special circuitry for that.) But the picture twittered and vibrated a bit at the junctures of those intersecting diagonal lines.

The Articos had a hard time with a third test pattern on Video Essentials, apparently a difficult one for all DLP sets. This one shows narrowly spaced white dashes on a black field. When the pattern popped onto the screen, a wide, gray, jagged apparition appeared that looked like a fat frequency chart stretching across the screen from left to right. Over three or four seconds it narrowed to a line, then disappeared. Scary.

It was difficult to see any of these issues while watching actual video material. But you need to know that if the Articos has trouble with these charts, the same troubles could now and then mar the picture.—JB