Even though I haven't had very good luck with my internet service in the past month or so, I have had a good chance to run my new HL61A750 through its paces.
A few questions I've been asked:
Size -
From the top of tv stand to the bottom of the screen is 7". Nice for setting a smaller center channel speaker on the stand in front of the tv, except then the remote wont hit the sensor on the tv. Otherwise its a little 'blingy' at first, but hardly noticeable after a while.
The top and both sides are roughly 1/2", so the overall size is mostly the screen.
I have a fairly deep tv stand and I have it about 6" away from the wall to help with running wires, and from the wall to the front of the tv is still only 24". The tv itself is barely 14" deep.
Viewing angle -
Side to side is not bad at all. With 0 degrees being directly on the side of the tv and 90 degrees being directly in front of the tv, I often sit at my computer, which would be 45 degrees, while watching tv and notice no degradation in color, lighting, or quality. Pretty much equal to being directly in front of it. 45 degrees to 0 degrees there is some loss, but not nearly as noticeable as the last dlp set I had. The only point in my room where I can get less then about 30 degrees is less than 4 feet away from the tv, so pretty much any place I could sit in the room has good side to side viewing.
Top to bottom is a little different. With 0 degrees being directly below it, 90 degrees being directly in front of it, and 180 degrees being directly on top of it, there is no loss between roughly 55 degrees and 135 degrees. Between 135 degrees and up to about 160 degrees, there is a slow loss of light. Above 160 degrees and you can start to see a shadow effect caused by the screen and screen cover reflecting differently. Between 55 degrees down to about 45 degrees there is a loss in light as well, and below the 45 degree angle you can start to see the shadowing again. Pretty much any standard seating allows the viewing angle to be optimum. Extremely high seating or sitting on the floor directly in front of the tv are pretty much the only times when the viewing angle will cause a problem.
When checking out the viewing angles for the extreme sides, top, and bottom, I was forced to be within a couple feet of the tv - not really optimum viewing distance. My computer is on a 45 degree side angle about 5 feet away and on a 90 degree top/bottom angle and the picture looks great. My normal seating is about 10ft - 18ft away, and any side to side angle or top/bottom angle short of standing on the 10ft chairs produces a perfect picture.
Room Lighting -
I have my tv on a west wall with two very large windows. Even as I write this at 7pm with the blinds open and the sun blinding me, the tv still produces enough light to be seen clearly and it only gets better the darker the room is.
With the blinds closed and the room lights on I notice no reflections or washing effects at all.
Picture -
I may be a little biased in this portion of my review as my reciever upscales everything to 1080p. I haven't had a chance to run any lower quality stuff directly through the tv yet, but low quality home movies that I have burned to disc (again, upscaled through the receiver) still look great on the tv. Blu-ray and HD-DVD's running at their native 1080p look absolutely stunning.
The color is great. My last dlp set (hd-ila) had really deep and rich blacks, but had too warm of a look on bright colors and whites. This set seems to have not only stunning blacks and deep/rich dark colors, but also seems to do very well on the brighter colors and whites. The led's seem to do a far better job than the old bulb units.
The display is full color, full lit from corner to corner. A lot of people have been worried about seeing dark sides and fading at the corners. I have not seen anything like this. The led bulb does a good job lighting up the entire screen. No worries here!
Another few pluses of the led's:
No rainbow effect. I rarely noticed it on my old set, but when I did it really bothered me.
No warm up time. About 5 seconds after hitting the power I have a full color, full lit picture. Not that the 20 or so second warm up time was all that bothering on my old unit, but its a nice change.
Connections -
Here is one of my three complaints on the unit.
The connections are plentiful enough for me since my receiver handles all of that any way. The problem is, they are on the right side of the tv. May not be a big deal for some, but I have my entire rack setup on the the left of the tv and I have to order a few new cables do to being just to short now.
The tv senses what connections have things connected to them and separates the osd list into whats plugged in and whats not so you don't have to scroll through all the inputs to get to the ones you want. The problem with this is, you have to have something plugged in and turned on (even if its in standby mode) in order to be able to select that input. You cant switch to an input that doesn't have anything plugged in to it. A better choice for fast scrolling of the inputs would be that of the toshiba lcds (and probably others, but toshiba is the only one I have experience with) where there is a list of inputs and you can simply press a number on the remote to select that input.
The Remote -
On to complaint number two, which coincidentally leads to complaint 3.
The remote is well laid out and easy to get used to. It has a backlight function for night viewing. It can be programmed to use with other devices. All the standards of a remote. Except it only works part time. Until I bring myself to buying a harmony remote ($$$), I have a remote for just about everything. And when using more than just the tv remote, the tv seems to forget how to communicate with its remote. When just flipping channels or using only the tv remote, it works fine 100%. Start messing with the receiver when I have the tv on and suddenly no tv remote. Use the dvd remote while the tv is on - no more tv remote. Play the Wii while the tv is on - no more tv remote. It seems that no matter what kind of remote it is, as long as its ir it will cause the tv to forget all about its remote. The only solution is to turn the tv off for a while or use the buttons on the tv.
The buttons on the tv -
On to the final complaint. The buttons on the tv are located on the bottom right side of the tv. Dismissing the fact that I have to walk up to the tv and move anything out of the way to get to the buttons, they are in just the right place that even with my long arms I still can't get a good view of the tv while I'm using them. I have to basically stretch my arms to the buttons while trying to stand in front of the tv to see the screen and guess at which buttons I'm hitting. It gets frustrating navigating through the menus only to find the menu I want and accidentally hit the cancel button instead of the accept button. Wouldn't be a big deal if the remote didn't stop working all the time!!
Overall opinions of the tv -
Picture: 9 out of 10. Stunning picture running 1080p, great color, great lighting. Downside is the viewing angles all dlp's suffer from.
Audio: 8 out of 10. I only ran the tv speakers for a minute, but they sounded good for tv speakers. Running the tv sound out of the tv to the receiver via composite rca's resulted in a very quite sound. Remedied by cranking the receiver volume or running the sound directly out of the cable/dish box for those with cable/dish.
Functionality: 9 out of 10. This score suffers due to the remote issues and bad placement of buttons. Although on a tv like this, I don't know where buttons could be better placed short of on the front with a flip down cover of sorts to hide them.
Overall: Overall I am very satisfied. After owning an older HD-ILA dlp set, a lcd set and a newer plasma set, I would rank this at the top of the list. Better in pretty much every aspect over my HD-ILA set. Makes the lcd look archaic. And rivals the plasma in producing great color without having to worry about burn in, not to mention the size/price ratio blows the plasma out of the water.
If anyone has any specific questions, feel free to ask. I will do my best to answer them and help anyone out!
A few questions I've been asked:
Size -
From the top of tv stand to the bottom of the screen is 7". Nice for setting a smaller center channel speaker on the stand in front of the tv, except then the remote wont hit the sensor on the tv. Otherwise its a little 'blingy' at first, but hardly noticeable after a while.
The top and both sides are roughly 1/2", so the overall size is mostly the screen.
I have a fairly deep tv stand and I have it about 6" away from the wall to help with running wires, and from the wall to the front of the tv is still only 24". The tv itself is barely 14" deep.
Viewing angle -
Side to side is not bad at all. With 0 degrees being directly on the side of the tv and 90 degrees being directly in front of the tv, I often sit at my computer, which would be 45 degrees, while watching tv and notice no degradation in color, lighting, or quality. Pretty much equal to being directly in front of it. 45 degrees to 0 degrees there is some loss, but not nearly as noticeable as the last dlp set I had. The only point in my room where I can get less then about 30 degrees is less than 4 feet away from the tv, so pretty much any place I could sit in the room has good side to side viewing.
Top to bottom is a little different. With 0 degrees being directly below it, 90 degrees being directly in front of it, and 180 degrees being directly on top of it, there is no loss between roughly 55 degrees and 135 degrees. Between 135 degrees and up to about 160 degrees, there is a slow loss of light. Above 160 degrees and you can start to see a shadow effect caused by the screen and screen cover reflecting differently. Between 55 degrees down to about 45 degrees there is a loss in light as well, and below the 45 degree angle you can start to see the shadowing again. Pretty much any standard seating allows the viewing angle to be optimum. Extremely high seating or sitting on the floor directly in front of the tv are pretty much the only times when the viewing angle will cause a problem.
When checking out the viewing angles for the extreme sides, top, and bottom, I was forced to be within a couple feet of the tv - not really optimum viewing distance. My computer is on a 45 degree side angle about 5 feet away and on a 90 degree top/bottom angle and the picture looks great. My normal seating is about 10ft - 18ft away, and any side to side angle or top/bottom angle short of standing on the 10ft chairs produces a perfect picture.
Room Lighting -
I have my tv on a west wall with two very large windows. Even as I write this at 7pm with the blinds open and the sun blinding me, the tv still produces enough light to be seen clearly and it only gets better the darker the room is.
With the blinds closed and the room lights on I notice no reflections or washing effects at all.
Picture -
I may be a little biased in this portion of my review as my reciever upscales everything to 1080p. I haven't had a chance to run any lower quality stuff directly through the tv yet, but low quality home movies that I have burned to disc (again, upscaled through the receiver) still look great on the tv. Blu-ray and HD-DVD's running at their native 1080p look absolutely stunning.
The color is great. My last dlp set (hd-ila) had really deep and rich blacks, but had too warm of a look on bright colors and whites. This set seems to have not only stunning blacks and deep/rich dark colors, but also seems to do very well on the brighter colors and whites. The led's seem to do a far better job than the old bulb units.
The display is full color, full lit from corner to corner. A lot of people have been worried about seeing dark sides and fading at the corners. I have not seen anything like this. The led bulb does a good job lighting up the entire screen. No worries here!
Another few pluses of the led's:
No rainbow effect. I rarely noticed it on my old set, but when I did it really bothered me.
No warm up time. About 5 seconds after hitting the power I have a full color, full lit picture. Not that the 20 or so second warm up time was all that bothering on my old unit, but its a nice change.
Connections -
Here is one of my three complaints on the unit.
The connections are plentiful enough for me since my receiver handles all of that any way. The problem is, they are on the right side of the tv. May not be a big deal for some, but I have my entire rack setup on the the left of the tv and I have to order a few new cables do to being just to short now.
The tv senses what connections have things connected to them and separates the osd list into whats plugged in and whats not so you don't have to scroll through all the inputs to get to the ones you want. The problem with this is, you have to have something plugged in and turned on (even if its in standby mode) in order to be able to select that input. You cant switch to an input that doesn't have anything plugged in to it. A better choice for fast scrolling of the inputs would be that of the toshiba lcds (and probably others, but toshiba is the only one I have experience with) where there is a list of inputs and you can simply press a number on the remote to select that input.
The Remote -
On to complaint number two, which coincidentally leads to complaint 3.
The remote is well laid out and easy to get used to. It has a backlight function for night viewing. It can be programmed to use with other devices. All the standards of a remote. Except it only works part time. Until I bring myself to buying a harmony remote ($$$), I have a remote for just about everything. And when using more than just the tv remote, the tv seems to forget how to communicate with its remote. When just flipping channels or using only the tv remote, it works fine 100%. Start messing with the receiver when I have the tv on and suddenly no tv remote. Use the dvd remote while the tv is on - no more tv remote. Play the Wii while the tv is on - no more tv remote. It seems that no matter what kind of remote it is, as long as its ir it will cause the tv to forget all about its remote. The only solution is to turn the tv off for a while or use the buttons on the tv.
The buttons on the tv -
On to the final complaint. The buttons on the tv are located on the bottom right side of the tv. Dismissing the fact that I have to walk up to the tv and move anything out of the way to get to the buttons, they are in just the right place that even with my long arms I still can't get a good view of the tv while I'm using them. I have to basically stretch my arms to the buttons while trying to stand in front of the tv to see the screen and guess at which buttons I'm hitting. It gets frustrating navigating through the menus only to find the menu I want and accidentally hit the cancel button instead of the accept button. Wouldn't be a big deal if the remote didn't stop working all the time!!
Overall opinions of the tv -
Picture: 9 out of 10. Stunning picture running 1080p, great color, great lighting. Downside is the viewing angles all dlp's suffer from.
Audio: 8 out of 10. I only ran the tv speakers for a minute, but they sounded good for tv speakers. Running the tv sound out of the tv to the receiver via composite rca's resulted in a very quite sound. Remedied by cranking the receiver volume or running the sound directly out of the cable/dish box for those with cable/dish.
Functionality: 9 out of 10. This score suffers due to the remote issues and bad placement of buttons. Although on a tv like this, I don't know where buttons could be better placed short of on the front with a flip down cover of sorts to hide them.
Overall: Overall I am very satisfied. After owning an older HD-ILA dlp set, a lcd set and a newer plasma set, I would rank this at the top of the list. Better in pretty much every aspect over my HD-ILA set. Makes the lcd look archaic. And rivals the plasma in producing great color without having to worry about burn in, not to mention the size/price ratio blows the plasma out of the water.
If anyone has any specific questions, feel free to ask. I will do my best to answer them and help anyone out!
-- $1300 shipped white-glove style minus the $200 NFLShop rebate although I'm not sure yet how to get the UPC label off the box in a way that satisfies the rebate requirement since the darned shipping company stuck a big shipping sticker over the UPC label. 
