Toshiba 46HM84
We bought a new TV this past week, a Toshiba 46HM84 from Onecall.com. This replaces the 8-year-old 27″ Quasar.
The comparison picture to the left doesn’t do the new Toshiba justice, because the 27″ sits so far foward of the Toshiba, it appears much larger than it actual is in. CNET has a simple 16:9 to 4:3 calculator, as does this site, which gives better dimension comparisons. For 4:3 images, the new TV has about twice as much screen real estate as the old set. This, of course, doesn’t count the letterboxed screen shape. In addition, the new TV has a nice, flat anti-glare screen, which works well for our living room, as the windows are behind the TV.
I picked the Toshiba mainly because it is a rear-projection DLP with the TI HD2+ chip, which hit a nice price point. The comparisons were with the “Captain Kirk” Samsung and the Mitsubishi. The Samsung was much more expensive (and I didn’t like the pedestal), while the Mitsubishi had a horrible reflective screen coating that made the set kind of useless in a reasonably lit room. I had considered the HD3 DLPs earlier in the summer (mainly the Samsungs), but the Toshiba came out before I finished moving to Cleveland. We had also thought about a slightly larger set, say, the 52″ versions (52HM84), which seemed to be sized better in the showrooms, but would have been too big for the actual space. Another alternative would have been the 46HM94, which is the 84 with more inputs and a built-in HDTV card. We’re going to get HDTV through the cable box (or some hypothetical HD Tivo), so this seemed unnecessary. I basically want a monitor; if I could have gotten this TV without the unused built-in speakers, I would have.
So far, the picture is very big and bright, even with the lower-powered “night mode” lamp running during the day. We don’t have an HD feed (I have to talk to Adelphia at some point), so at best I can comment about how Standard Definition looks on the set. DVDs look very good, even though I haven’t convinced our very old player to use anamorphic mode (I lost the original remote and can’t access the machine’s menus properly). Video is also through S-Video, so DVD video can only improve as we upgrade the components and interconnects. Broadcast TV is piped through the Tivo, so the image won’t be as pristine as possible out of the cable box. Most of our shows were recorded at Medium Quality, and they don’t look very good on the larger screen (the size magnifies every defect of the NTSC stream, especially the Tivo compression artifacts, so you get banding on colors and regions that digitally “twitch”), but it’s passable. Highest Quality is fine, so “live TV” works well. Tivo’s High Quality is perfectly acceptable, and is probably similar to the viewing experience we had with the old TV. All our shows are now set for High Quality recording.
One minor disappointment is that I’m apparently one of those people who can see rainbows in the single-chip DLP projection, mainly on white objects that move quickly across the screen. The rainbows are very brief and only occassional (I sometimes see them when blinking on a contrasty scene) and don’t bother me very much. I didn’t see rainbows in the showrooms, so this might also be due to Tivo compression artifacts or the Standard Definition video we’re watching.
There’s, of course, a cascade of upgrades once one piece of a 6-year-old AV setup gets changed. I’m keeping the speakers, which are perfectly fine (though the center speaker now has to go in the cabinet underneath the TV, as there’s no flat spot on top to perch it on). The receiver was updated a few months ago with last year’s Harmon Kardon digital receiver when I caught it a Friday sale at Amazon. I’ve ordered a replacement for the DVD player, Tivo and VCR, in the sense that we’re picking up the Humax combo unit (minus the VCR, but plus the DVD burner). Presumably, regular Tivo can be shot out through the component video outputs in addition to progressive scan DVD video; this will make wiring and using the whole setup a lot easier. This Series 2 Tivo will also allow us to stream music from the computer using Home Media functionality. I already have a USB 802.11b adapter we’re not using, but which should work on the Humax Tivos.
Lastly, props/thumbs-up/whatever-the-cool-kids-say-nowadays to Onecall.com. Their prices were cheaper than elsewhere (currently, 10% off, plus a $125 discount for the holidays, and a miscellaneous discount for being on their mailing list) and they delivered the product perfectly fine. But that’s what’s expected: what was unexpected was that I saw that they were having a 2-day sale through techbargains.com, with the price reduced a further almost-10%. Even though I had already ordered the TV and was expecting delivery on that day, I called their customer support and asked them to knock the difference off my own order. Onecall.com doesn’t have a price guarantee, so had no obligation to respond to me, but they let me have the TV for the lower price, the difference being credited to my card. In the end, I wound up paying a bit more than $2300 for the set, plus a $20 tip to the guy who helped me get the TV into the apartment (it’s not heavy at around 80lbs, but bulky) (which was a better deal than paying $160+ for “white glove delivery”). The local stores would have charged at least $2700 + 8% OH tax. So a big thumbs-up for Onecall.
Update: Just a note on the various “zoom” modes to deal with 4:3 content on a 16:9 screen. This Toshiba comes with five different modes:
- Natural, which renders the 4:3 image in the center of the screen, flanked by gray bars. I think Toshiba made a big mistake in not making these bars black, as the gray is too bright and distracting.
- TheaterWide1, which stretches the 4:3 so that the center area is undistorted but the areas on the sides are distorted. This is actually pretty natural to look at, with only occassional noticeable distortion when the action takes place towards one of the sides. Generally, people look a little “fatter” if they’re towards the edges. We watch most 4:3 content in this mode, in part because the bright gray bars in the Natural mode are distracting, or, rather, the bars are more distracting than the seldom noticed distortion on the edges.
- TheaterWide 2, which is a straight magnification without distortion of the 4:3 image. This is for letterboxed content in which the top and bottom black bars are actually encoded in the NTSC stream. We’re using this for most DVD content right now because I can’t get the old player to output in anamorphic.
- TheaterWide 3, which is the same as TheaterWide 2, but with the image shifted up in the screen. This is, again, for letterboxed contect with the bars in the NTSC stream, but with subtitles ranging in the bottom black bar.
- Full, which is for anamorphic output from a DVD player. Anamorphic widescreen doesn’t encode black bars in the stream, but instead has a flag that tells the video monitor that it’s actually a widescreen image so that it will be properly stretched and displayed. The benefit is that some 30% of the video stream isn’t wasted in encoding black bars, so the resulting image is more detailed. The TV is supposed to automatically sense anamorphic video and select the zoom mode appropriately, but I haven’t tested this because of my inability to get to the configuration menus for the player. As noted, I’m replacing this player in the next week or so.