OTHER TECH

This category covers a lot of ground, from picture brightness to the level of detail visible in shadows and highlights. Makers of flat TVs often crow about the amazing contrast ratios their sets are capable of, but that spec is pretty meaningless unless the TV is properly set up and tested with patterns that approximate the programs people watch.

All three reviewers noted that the Sharp LCD looked brighter than the Samsung plasma (after calibration, its peak brightness did measure somewhat higher), although DK felt that the difference wasn't much of an issue. The LCD's overall picture contrast turned out to be more controversial. DR and I had a problem with how it handled both shadow details and highlights in images. But blacks looked very rich and deep - the LCD set was much better with this than the plasma, which barely dipped below a very dark gray in most of the clips we looked at. But DR and I both found that shadow details, or the gray tones just above black on the brightness scale, were swallowed up by the LCD in most dark scenes.

At the other end of the scale, whenever a bright image appeared onscreen, both DR and I felt the LCD could produce only a limited range of highlights (the lightest areas in the picture). A good example was a scene of snowy peaks from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring. On the LCD, mounds and creases in the snow tended to blend into a unified white mass. The same was true in a shot of the space shuttle taking off from the high-def D-VHS tape of Digital Video Essentials. Both the billowing clouds of smoke and the intricate web of white-painted hardware on the shuttle's launch pad looked somewhat featureless and washed out on the LCD compared with the plasma. With most images, DR and I felt the plasma was much more adept at conveying details from both the light and dark ends of the spectrum.

Interestingly, DK disagreed with us on many of these points. Although he acknowledged that highlight details in bright scenes like the space-shuttle launch looked blown-out on the LCD compared with the plasma, he thought the LCD's contrast had more impact overall. He also commented that along with its deeper blacks, the LCD's picture consistently revealed more shadow detail. As for the plasma, he characterized its shadows as being "muddier" than the LCD's. Taking all of these observations into account, the plasma ended up with a slightly higher Contrast score than the LCD.

If there's one thing that's guaranteed to look different on any two TVs, it's color. Check out a row of sets at your local electronics store, and you'll see what I mean. But even though our efforts to optimize the color setups on both the plasma and LCD were nothing short of heroic, each TV retained a distinct color signature. That factor was given some weight in this part of the evaluation, which covered both color accuracy and the set's ability to reproduce vibrant, natural-looking colors no matter how dark or bright the image onscreen (grayscale linearity).

The LCD's color rendition held greater appeal for DK, although he did comment that its primary colors seemed less accurate than the plasma's. Watching both DVDs and HDTV, he thought the LCD's color was better saturated, with more natural reds. He wasn't too bothered by the set's tendency to go greenish in dark scenes - a sticking point for DR and me. As for the plasma, DK thought that it emphasized reds, making Frodo's face in The Fellowship of the Ring look too flush in closeup shots.

While the LCD color performance was good, I thought it looked less natural than the plasma. I found that it emphasized reds, making faces look slightly sunburned. DR also picked up on this, but he saw the problem as more in the yellows, which he felt were being shifted toward orange. We both also noted that the LCD's colors tended to look pale in bright shots. I called the plasma's color "CRT-like," meaning that the picture was vibrant and deep, with a wide range of subtle hues visible in both light and dark images. After I tallied up the positive and negative comments, plasma took the Color round by two to one.