The Perfect Vision
Hitachi P50H401
Additional Notes and Technical Ratings
Under the Hood | Adjustment Notes | Test Discs | Technical Ratings
Under the Hood
Hitachi designs and produces its own video processor, called PictureMaster HD IV, which provides MPEG noise reduction, dynamic contrast, and 16-bit color processing among other functions. The integrated tuner can accept NTSC, ATSC, and QAM cable signals.
The online specs tout “Pure HDTV Blue and Red,” but my measurements indicate that red is significantly oversaturated. The four HD aspect-ratio settings include “16:9 Standard2,” which eliminates overscanning. Separate Day and Night modes can be selected directly from the remote or activated with a timer for different viewing conditions.
Adjustment Notes
The menu system behaved very slowly, taking a couple of seconds to move from one menu to the next. Oddly, the set passed below-black from the Toshiba HD-XA2 HD DVD player but not from Accupel signal generator and Denon DVD-5910 DVD player. Contrast, brightness, and color saturation were both low out of the box; in fact, contrast could be maxed out without clipping whites. Tint had to be skewed toward green to bring color decoding closest to accurate. Black level was very high, and contrast was fairly low, leading to a washed out picture in general. Red was oversaturated, and green was severely oversaturated. An aspect setting of 16:9 Standard2 appeared to eliminate overscan.
Test Discs
The detail test on the HQV Benchmark DVD looked fine. Jaggies were slightly evident, but pretty minor. The Digital Noise Reduction (DNR) control reduced noise nicely without softening the picture appreciably, but the MPEG NR control did soften the picture at its High setting; the Low setting produced a better result overall. The set’s processor picked up 3:2 pulldown at 480i almost immediately, and it handled other cadences better than most TVs I’ve seen.
Switching to the HQV Benchmark HD DVD, the Video and Film Resolution Loss Tests revealed that high-resolution information is lost in both cases. On Microsoft engineer Stacey Spears’ test disc, the highest-frequency horizontal burst was nearly invisible, and the vertical burst was flickering strongly. The processor never quite picked up 3:2 pulldown at 1080i, but the moiré artifacts were less objectionable than in many other sets
Technical Ratings
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