The Perfect Vision
HP LC4776N Additional Notes and Technical Ratings
Under the Hood | Adjustment Notes | Test Discs | Technical Ratings
Under the Hood
The LC4776N boasts a 6ms response time, and the HDMI inputs are Simplay-certified, which assures that they will work as HDMI is supposed to. There is no 1:1 pixel-mapping mode for 1080i/p signals, which means that all such signals are scaled slightly, degrading the picture in the process. VGA computer signals are not scaled, and all VESA resolutions up to 1366x768 are supported.
Adjustment Notes
The User picture mode is the only one that provides access to the standard picture controls. Out of the box, contrast and saturation were too high, brightness and hue were just about right. Interestingly, sharpness seemed to have no effect on ringing, so I left it at its default value of 50. A full-screen black field was not very uniform, especially when viewed off-axis; the corners were brighter than the center (especially lower right), and the top center of the screen looked like there were two light sources shining down from behind the bezel when viewed off-axis. Black level was very high, as was peak white level, leading to a relatively high contrast ratio.
Test Discs
Looking at the HQV Benchmark DVD, detail was good, and jaggies were mild to moderate, with obvious jaggies in the waving American flag. Noise was quite visible, and the set offers no noise-reduction control. The set’s processor picked up 3:2 pulldown at 480i very quickly, but a bit of shimmering remained in the bleachers as the race car drives past.
Turning to the HQV Benchmark HD DVD, there was some slight shimmering in the high-frequency box of the video resolution loss test, and significant banding in the high-frequency box of the film resolution loss test. The pan across the stadium bleachers was relatively artifact-free, and jaggies were invisible.
On Microsoft engineer Stacey Spears’ test HD DVD, overscan was obvious on the pixel-phase pattern, and the cropping pattern revealed that the set crops more than 30 pixels on each edge of the image. There was significant banding in both the horizontal and vertical high-frequency bursts. The processor picked up 3:2 pulldown at 1080i almost instantly. During the montage of images, there was some flickering in the pan across diagonal piano strings and some Moiré distortion in the scene with a screen door.
Technical Ratings
Customer Service
Advertisement
