OTHER TECH

Of all the factors that contribute to a good-looking TV picture, contrast is probably the most crucial because it can affect other important things like color and detail. Our assessment of contrast - an admittedly broad category - took into account not only the TV's ability to cleanly reproduce a full range of steps between the blackest black and the whitest white, but also the relative evenness of those steps. We also looked at the TV's shadow depth and detail and its overall brightness level. Finally, we kept an eye on how well it maintained those qualities as the picture shifted between bright and dark scenes.

DR, DK, and I all judged that the Samsung DLP had considerably better shadow depth than the Hitachi LCD - blacks on the DLP simply looked, well, blacker. We could clearly see this in a scene from the Ed Wood DVD (it's a black-and-white movie) that takes place in a dark bar. Both TVs revealed plenty of fine detail in the pictures and signs hanging on the dank walls - DR concluded that the LCD was better than the DLP at shadow detail - but the LCD's inability to render a truly deep black flattened its image somewhat. Ultimately, we all agreed that the DLP created a deeper, more three-dimensional picture.

We also all saw shifts in the LCD's overall contrast. This was most obvious on test patterns, but we could also see it in some movie clips. In a bright mountain scene from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring on DVD, fine shadings in the snow blended into the surrounding white on the LCD, but the DLP displayed a broad range of subtle tones.

I was irked by the DLP's tendency to emphasize white areas of the picture, which gave everything an "enhanced" look - the video equivalent of listening to music with your receiver's treble control turned up too high. To me, picture highlights looked much smoother on the LCD, particularly in bright and high-contrast shots. But "enhanced" is in the eye of the beholder, I guess, because both DK and preferred the DLP's punchy picture. DK, for instance, liked the greater level of "pop" in dark DVD movies like Pirates of the Caribbean. Ultimately, though, the DLP gave the LCD a sound whomping when it came to contrast.