Reviewer: Thomas Bartlett
Sanyo’s entry here is a minimally equipped unit, but with a certain raw performance that makes it very good value for money.
What you get is a large LCD screen of 42 inches (107 cm) with the full high definition resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels. What you don’t get is an inbuilt digital TV tuner, nor any tricky contrast ratio enhancements.
The two analog TV tuners are okay, but LCD panels and analog TV just don’t go well together. So pick up a high definition TV tuner (or better yet, a HD PVR) and plug it into one of the two HDMI inputs.
The contrast ratio is specified at 1500:1, and the net result is full black images tend to look dark grey, with a very slightly blue cast. This gives a subjective impression of deeper blacks than the claimed contrast ratio suggests. The top corners of the panel glow a little more brightly than the rest of the screen.
The TV has a couple of interesting processing options. One is called ‘DCDi’. This doesn’t seem to detect film-sourced material, though, it merely smooths out jaggies on diagonal lines. The other is called ‘CCS’, which is said to improve the clarity of moving images. This didn’t seem to do anything on Blu-ray discs.
The TV accepts over HDMI all the video signals likely to be found in a home, from standard definition 576i all the way up to Blu-ray/HD DVD 1080p (progressive scan), including at the 24 frames per second rate. This didn’t appear to smooth the motion though. The full HD panel is also hampered by the fact that the picture is always scaled up a little, so the incoming signal is not ‘mapped’ precisely onto the pixels of the display. This can reduce clarity a little in some cases.
