Higher-End TV Models Get More Price-Friendly

[Gregg Lengling]

Stephen Williams can be reached at steve.williams@ newsday.com.

December 3, 2002

My cocooning season officially began this past weekend.

This is a good time of the year to consider buying a new television: The weather's getting bad, a slew of irresistible DVD titles are just out on the shelves or are about to be, and, since retailers don't move tons of sets during the holidays - not too many people give giant TVs as gifts - they may be in a negotiating mood, especially on the higher-end models.

The high-end models are what we're talking about (although these are not stratospherically priced TVs, although some 42-inch plasma sets are creeping tantalizingly close to $4,000). Toshiba's 42-inch rear-projection set sells at discount for about $1,500, and Samsung's 30-inch conventional CRT monitor is priced friendly at less than $1,200 at discount.

Both these sets can carry high-definition TV signals with the addition of a set-top receiver.

Except in New York - where most over-the-air HD transmitters were wiped out in the collapse of the World Trade Center - HDTV is beginning to catch on nationally. In October, factory-to-retail sales of digital television products set a record sales number of $472 million, according to the Consumer Electronics Association, up nearly 40 percent from the previous year. The association projects 2.7 million DTV products will be sold this year, four million in 2003.

HD aside, everyone by now knows that widescreen "HD-ready" monitors are ideal for watching high- resolution images off a DVD, especially with a DVD player capable of outputting a progressive scan signal. Both the Toshiba and Samsung excel at reproducing these signals.

The Toshiba 42H82, is the latest in the company's range of widescreen rear-projectors. The footprint is wide but the depth is narrow; although the cabinet color scheme is dull - if I were to be kind, I'd describe it as "gray" - the self-contained box (the speakers sit in the base) will fit neatly into a small living room.

Brightness is not a problem - in fact, you'll want to adjust down contrast and brightness levels in the control menu. Because the tuner and its "DFine High-Speed Velocity Scan Modulation" captures images so well, poor-quality signals can be irritatingly edgy and fatiguing to watch. The DirecTV broadcast of ESPN's Colts-Broncos NFL game a week ago Sunday was so ghosty and out of register that it gave me a headache (cured when the Colts won in OT).

The flat screen sheds ambient reflections well but the viewing angle is limited, both horizontally and vertically. Don't seat your best friend far off to the side during "The Sopranos." This off-axis decline in picture brightness is a bugaboo that rear-projection technology - even though it's a mature technology - can't seem to solve. Which is one reason why plasma and LCD are the big- screen future of television. Some pixelization also slightly degrades the image, most noticeably when playing high-quality DVDs.

The Samsung is one of the first HDTV-ready tubes that's priced for those who thought HDTV-ready tubes were overpriced. Smart shoppers can find it for less than $1,200 online.

The 16:9 format, 30-inch flat screen, housed in a smart, silver cabinet, is rather fat (at 22 inches deep) but will fit where 34-inch monitors won't. Samsung packs plenty of technology into this package - a scan line doubler to improve broadcast pictures, a comb filter for better detail, two tuners for picture-in-picture function - but neglects to put an S-video jack at the rear (there is one - only one - on the side panel).

Setup is unerringly easy, sound is adequate from the Samsung's 20-watt internal amplifier for the left and right speakers, plus a 25-watt powered subwoofer built into the rear of the set. The picture, once adjusted from the factory defaults to more subtle levels, is very pleasing. And the 3:2 pull-down processing circuit - which eliminates artifacts caused by the different frame rates between film-based material like DVDs and video playback - adds a smoother look to all source material.