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Panasonic 36HX42 at Circuit City (1 Viewer)

Brent Hutto

Supporting Actor
Joined
Aug 30, 2001
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532
Well, unless it blows up tomorrow, the final answer is...

...a Sony 36XBR800. It arrived at Circuit City from their warehouse around 1:00PM Saturday and was delivered to my living room by a few minutes after 6:00 the same day. I must say that for all the ins and outs of this deal, the sales guy at Circuit City expedited things very nicely at the end.

The matching stand will be in later this week so for now it's sitting on a coffee table which fortunately happened to be the perfect size.

The geometry is basically OK. The usual horizontal bowing is there if you look hard but not enough to notice when a movie is playing (especially once I added some black cardboard mattes). The biggest flaw is that the left side overscans about 7% but the other three sides are 2-3%, which I guess is acceptable. There is also a slight droop to the left-most one inch or so, grid lines on Avia show the left edge to droop about 1/4" downward.

Using Color, Tint, Brightness and Contrast there's no way to get the red push under control. Right now Avia with the color filters shows -10% on blue between -10% and -15% on green and at least +15% on red. It's seldom noticable in movies but you can tell it's there if you look for it.

As expected, local channels on analog cable look noisy and grainy sitting 7' away but would be quite acceptable from, say, 10-12'. Dish Network ranges from almost unwatchable to pretty decent depending on the channel and the time of day. Both of these are with the DRC near mininum on both axes.

The real test was Lord of the Rings. I did my best Avia tuneup of the picture and surround sound, put top and bottom mattes around the picture, darkened the room as well as possible and watched it for the first time since it was in the theaters this evening. It was amazingly good. This screen is just big enough to give a hint of movie screen feel (about 20 degrees of horizontal angle subtended) and the image was worlds better than when we saw it at the theater. The sound environment was enough to give you chills running 10dB under reference level. My only complaint was that from the arrival in Lothlorien and for most of the rest of the movie the picture was grainy at time, but that was in the original print I suspect.

We're very, very pleased. Was it worth darned near $3,000? In truth, that's probably too much to spend to watch a couple of DVD's a week. But if a TV can provide that much value, this one is "the one".
 

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