The New TV's Here!

Two Fridays ago, as previously mentioned here (the wrapup of a two-part LCD tirade), I ordered a factory-refurbished Magnavox 37MF321D/37B 37" widescreen LCD from the Philips Outlet website. It finally arrived today, to my wife’s great relief (I’d been driving her nuts, repeatedly wondering aloud when it’d get here) and although I’m pretty swamped with other work projects today, I took a brief break to put the display together and hook a few video peripherals to it.

Surprise #1: no assembly instructions were in the box, although I realized after-the-fact that I could have downloaded them online. It took a few minutes’ worth of head-scratching before I (think I) figured out how to mount the underneath speakers (which I probably won’t use anyway) and the stand to the display chassis. Surprise #2: although the display chassis and speaker sub-assembly are both black, Philips mistakenly included a silver stand (which I suspect was for the 37MF231D/37B). I’m caught in a bit of an ‘infinite loop’ at the moment, with Philips’ product registration team telling me I can’t re-register something that’s already registered (it was pre-owned, remember), and the technical support team telling me that they can’t ship me a free replacement stand under the 90-day limited warranty terms until the display’s registered in my name….sigh….but I think/hope I’ll have it sorted out by week-end.

So far I’ve hooked the SureWest high-def IPTV set top box to the display over a component video interconnection, and the PlayStation 3 to the 37MF321D/37B over HDMI. Both work and look great. I’ve confirmed that, courtesy of the PS3’s latest firmware update, it’s up-scaling red laser DVD video content to 1080i through the HDMI link. The display’s ‘automatic’ scaling setting didn’t work very well with Serenity’s 2.35:1 aspect ratio; the 37MF321D/37B vertically stretched the video to fill the screen, resulting in an excessively tall-and-skinny River and rest of crew. So I hard-coded the display setting for this particular video input to ‘widescreen’.

I long suspected that my prior display, Princeton’s AF3.0HD 30" widescreen HD CRT, was ‘forgiving’ of standard-definition material (or said another way, didn’t robustly reproduce high-def content). That past conjecture seems accurate now that I’m staring at the 37MF321D/37B (although, in its defense, the AF3.0HD was a 7" diagonal smaller set). Frankly, it’s a bit painful for me (but thankfully, not for my wife) to watch standard-definition content on this 37" LCD, as the ‘blocky’ pixel artifacts are clearly visible to my eyes. On that same note, it’s very obvious (again, to me, not to Lil) when SureWest’s high-def channels are broadcasting up-scaled standard-def material, versus video that was natively captured with high-def cameras. I’ve noticed the same phenomenon in the past when observing standard-vs-high definition over-the-air broadcasts (and on that note, I haven’t yet tried out the 37MF321D/37B’s built-in NTSC, ATSC and unencrypted QAM capabilities).

I can already tell from my brief eyeball inspection of the display that I’m going to need to put Joe Kane Productions’ Digital Video Essentials High Definition Edition (which’ll require that I first hook up the Xbox 360 and its HD DVD drive) to work on it. For one thing, in classic show room setup fashion, the display’s default contrast setting is cranked to the max (see here for part two of the previously-linked article series). On that same note, I’d welcome feedback from PS3 owners on whether I should be driving the display over HDMI at 1080i or 720p, considering the set’s 1366×768 pixel native resolution, the display’s built-in scaler capabilities (or, depending on your perspective, lack thereof), and the fact that I’ll primarily be using the PS3 as a DVD and Blu-ray Disc player.

As for me, it’s back to (other) work….

Followup: Lil and I watched the Blu-ray pressing of Kung Fu Hustle last night. The video was crisp and clear (with no perceptible motion blur), whereas in the past on the AF3.0HD it had been (now-)comparatively soft, and the PS3’s Cross Media Bar GUI was similarly fine-detailed. I realize as I write this that one person’s ’soft’ is another’s ’smooth’, and that one person’s ‘crisp’ is another’s ‘grainy’….but all in all, we’re quite pleased with our purchase so far.