The Perfect Vision
Vizio VP50HDTV Additional Notes and Technical Ratings
Under the Hood | Adjustment Notes | Test Discs | Technical Ratings
Under the Hood
The VP50HDTV uses Vizio Color Vision (VCV) processing, which produces 231 billion colors and 6144 shades of gray. Color is processed with 24-bit resolution, which allows smoother transitions than most digital TVs.
The online specs indicate that the set has a selection of color-temperature presets, but there are none to be found. A trio of color controls—one each for red, green, and blue—are not sufficient to bring the grayscale closer to ideal, and you shouldn’t attempt this without the requisite training and measurement equipment in any case.
Adjustment Notes
Picture controls seem to have two values per numeric setting; for example, brightness at 44 can exhibit two different levels on the screen, almost like “half” values. This makes it difficult to set the values precisely. Custom picture mode is the only one that allows access to brightness, contrast, and saturation controls. Out of the box, brightness and sharpness were too high, contrast and saturation too low. The component input does not pass below-black, and the user menu has one set of RGB controls; the set’s grayscale tends toward blue with these controls at default values. It’s impossible to obtain a good grayscale with these controls. There are no color-temp presets. Red tended toward orange, green was very oversaturated.
Test Discs
Detail on the HQV Benchmark DVD looked fine, and jaggies were nearly non-existent. Digital NR (noise reduction) had virtually no effect on random or mosquito noise, but Motion NR had a strong effect on motion-related noise. Unfortunately, the effect was mostly negative, causing ghostly trails behind moving objects. I left both at 0. The Faroudja DCDi processor picked up 3:2 pulldown quickly and reliably at 480i.
Microsoft engineer Stacey Spears’ HD DVD test disc revealed that the processor picked up 3:2 pulldown at 1080i quickly and reliably as well. However, the 16:9 aspect ratio setting cropped more than 30 pixels on each edge of the image.
The HD DVD version of HQV Benchmark confirmed that jaggies were essentially invisible. Also, the set passed both the video and film resolution-loss tests with flying colors.
Technical Ratings
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