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 November 1, 2006  JVC LT-32X787 LCD TV
The pressure to make a profit is on for flat screens, and the brilliant marketing folks have come up with a strategy: Sell at a loss and make it up in volume! Their loss is our gain, so we decided to take a look at a high-quality LCD to see how it performed. The LT-32X787 (the name just trips off the tongue) is part of JVC’s new line of LCD TVs, which includes 26", 32", and 37" 768p sets, and 40" and 46" 1080p sets. One of this line’s main selling points is its use of JVC’s 32-bit CPU video processing, dubbed Genessa. Breaking ranks with most of the Faroudja-using world, JVC claims they can make even a 480i composite-video picture look good. They also use extensive and defeatable video-noise suppression to reduce the grain, blocking, and noise concurrent with weak signals. The JVC’s tuner can accept NTSC, ATSC terrestrial, and digital cable signals. You can feed it video signals via a 75-ohm antenna; its multiple composite, component, and S-video inputs; or its two HDMI inputs. Audio signals can arrive via the analog or digital inputs, including HDMI. Physically, the LT-32X787 is an attractive amalgam of silver and black plastic, and comes pre-attached to a removable triangular base. The set can also be mounted on a wall with a suitable piece of hardware. Setup happened in a flash, passing the "Look, Ma, no manual!" test with only a few setbacks. The finding of inputs, channels, resolutions, and time and date was mostly automated. The large, backlit, easy-to-use remote can control DVD players, VCRs, and satellite or cable boxes. If everything looks a little blurry at first, be aware that the remote’s D/A button switches between digital and analog sources. I was wondering just how well the LT-32X787 would cover our local over-the-air high-definition broadcasts when I finally discovered this little secret. What a difference the push of a button can make! Running through the LT-32X787’s onscreen menus permitted quick and easy setup of the audio channels, with multiple V-Chip settings (both Canadian and US) for concerned parents. In a nice touch for those of us who use terrestrial antennas, a signal-strength meter is included to help you set the antenna’s direction just right. One part of the setup that was a bit confusing was setting the color temperature. The options are High and Low, but JVC doesn’t say what temperatures those settings represent. The secret is on the remote. Pushing the Theater Pro button gives you the flattest temperature possible: D6500. Push that before setting the brightness, contrast, color, and tint. Out of the box, skin tones looked pasty and the picture one-dimensional on the LT-32X787 -- but that was because the review sample had been calibrated for display in a Mega-Box showroom. Taking the picture settings to zero and hitting Theater Pro helped, but I had to dig deeper to find the culprits. If you’re one of the minority of our readers who don’t have a test DVD, you can use the JVC’s suite of helpful controls -- Color Management, Dynamic Gamma, Smart Picture, Digital Video Noise Reduction (VNR), MPEG Noise Reduction, and Smart Sensor -- to make the picture watchable. But spending 15 minutes with a setup disc or a Datacolor Spyder TV (my choice), and starting with all the Smart managers turned off, provided a far superior picture. Turning each of the color-management programs back on one by one took a toll. Set to Auto, Digital VNR worked pretty well, but left something to be desired in the area of what I call pixel recovery: fast-moving images created just the slightest blurring before quickly recovering, but the problem didn’t exist at all with Digital VNR turned off. Smart Sensor was the worst culprit: It automatically adjusts the contrast based on the program content, but in practice it just washes out the picture. Smart Sensor was almost as bad, adjusting the screen’s brightness based on the room’s level of ambient light. Bottom line: Anyone spending more than a few hundred dollars on a display and more than an hour or two a week watching it should invest either in a setup disc or a professional calibration. Once all the setup was done, I launched into the best torture test available in the fall: football. After watching football on a 108" screen from a distance of 14’, the experience of watching on a 32" screen from 5’ away was amazing. Color saturation and fine detail just popped off the screen. The CBS broadcast (1080i scaled to 768p) showed the tiny ventilation holes in the player’s uniforms. The CG blue and orange lines for scrimmage and first down perfectly matched the station’s graphics. Motion artifacts, one potential problem with slower LCD displays, revealed themselves only as a slight softening of the vent holes as a player ran by in close-up -- but there were no other artifacts. And watching Pittsburgh manhandle Kansas City gave me a chance to check on another LCD bugaboo: black levels. Pittsburgh’s black shirts had excellent shadow detail; I could see every crease and movement, with no hint of black crush. One big surprise: I heard crowd sounds from behind me. I’m no big fan of matrixed surround sound, let alone the two-speaker variety, but this really works. JVC calls it Advanced Hyper-Surround; I call it startling. Overall, the sound was better than I would have expected from such small speakers. I couldn’t feel the impact of a big tackle the way I can with a full-blown home theater, but the sounds were clear and comprehensible, and easy on the ears. Switching to Fox football, with its 720p signal, resulted in an even more solid picture. Now, even the moving vent holes remained clear. Grass blades looked like grass and Astroturf looked like plastic. The strain on coaches’ faces showed. Here’s the highest compliment I can give the JVC: I never felt I had to run to my projector-and-surround-sound home theater to enjoy the games. As long as I sat close enough, the experience, albeit different, had its own persuasiveness.
Films were a different experience. With a movie, size matters, but for someone needing a smaller display, the JVC offered a gorgeous picture. Through the LT-32X787’s HDMI input, 480p DVDs looked clearly less intricately detailed, but JVC’s Genessa video-processing system put out a fine picture. It sailed with no problem through such torture tests as chapter 10 of Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, in which bold colors support a panning shot across a railing’s balusters as horizontal lines flash in the background, all with bright, rhythmically blinking lights. No problem. A DVD of Martha Argerich performing Schumann’s Piano Concerto looked almost hi-def, with radiant color and perfect skin tones. Hi-def movies from HBO and UHD looked just as good as the football games, with very good, almost-black blacks, and colors so accurate that my eyes felt rested. In fact, everything looked so good that I decided to give the LT-32X787 the real torture test. I moved my chair closer and closer to the screen, until I could see either pixels or motion artifacts: the picture began to fall apart when I was 36" from the screen; each inch farther away made it look better. At a more reasonable distance of 60", it all looked great. JVC also seems to have conquered the other main objection to LCDs: off-angle viewing. Images on the LT-32X787 were clearly visible over a range of about 150 degrees. The final candle on the cake: When JVC sent me the LT-32X787, it cost $1999. Just a couple of months later, the list price had dropped to $1299.The set can now be found for less than $1100. JVC has developed a strong reputation among serious aficionados of home theater with their 1080p D-ILA front projectors, and I had a feeling their LCD TVs might carry on the family tradition. The LT-32X787 certainly has. …Wes Marshall JVC LT-32X787 LCD TV JVC Company of America Website: www.jvc.com
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