PRODUCT REVIEW: KREISEN KR-370T
KREISEN KR-370T 37-INCH LCD HDTV
Kreisen’s KR-370T is of special interest because of its low price (MSRP $2,699) and its use of LCD glass manufactured by LG Philips LCD. Can an LCD TV with a screen this size at this price point deliver the goods?
Regular readers know that the LCD TV market has seen some breathtaking drops in both suggested retail and street prices over the past twelve months. It wasn’t that long ago that the first Sharp 28-inch LCD TVs were making their way to our shores with price tags well above $12,000.
But a combination of rising consumer demand for flat panel TVs and increased competition from Korean and Chinese LCD manufacturers has thrown the LCD TV market into complete chaos. With careful shopping, you can now find 26-inch LCD TVs for under $1,000 and 30-inch and 32-inch models for well under $2,000.
While LCD has been unanimously declared the winner at 32 inches and below in the North American market, things aren’t so cut-and-dry at larger sizes. 32-inch plasma has pretty much vanished from big box stores, but there’s still plenty of 37-inch plasma product from Panasonic and Sony available.
However, those plasma TVs sell for well over $3,000, depending on how they are equipped (digital cable ready, or plain vanilla NTSC). Until recently, the only reasonable competitor in that screen size was Sharp with a variety of 37-inch LCD TVs carrying retail price tags above $4,000.
Figure 1. Front view of KR-370T
Kreisen is a newcomer to the U.S. TV market (the second largest in the world, by the way) and is selling both this 37-inch model and a new 40-inch version (MSRP $3,499). Unlike other off-brand resellers, Kreisen makes no bones about where their LCD panels come from (the 40-inch uses Samsung TFT LCD panels).
Given my special interest in the plasma vs. LCD wars, you can be sure I was very interested in giving the KR-370T a test drive to see just how well it performed, and if its substantial cost savings over comparably-sized plasma TVs was really a bargain.
OUT OF THE BOX
The KR-370T comes attached to a sturdy and attractive light gray aluminum stand, so all you’ll need to do is to lift it out of its box, place it on a table or stand, hook it up, and start watching. There are also six pre-threaded holes for attachment to an aftermarket wall bracket.
The front housing has two speakers built into it and they are aligned vertically to either side of the screen. They are not detachable as on some competing models, nor are there any external speaker terminals to connect to.
As far as input connections go, you’ll have a pair of composite (RCA) inputs, one S-video input (does anyone use S-video anymore?), a component YPbPr input with RCA jacks, a 15-pin VGA-style PC connector, and a DVI-D input for compatible set-top receivers and DVD players. An “F” style RF connector rounds out the complement.
Figure 2. View of connector input panel on KR-370T
The supplied remote control has a moderately complex button layout with the usual mousedisk and OK button for menu selections. You’ll have direct access to aspect ratio adjustments, picture presets, sound presets, favorite channels, and picture-in-picture (PiP). You can also freeze any image and enable closed captioning.
What you can’t do is access any of the AV inputs directly – you must toggle through all inputs to get to the one you want, which is a major annoyance in any TV as far as I am concerned. There is a button marked “PC/DVI” which toggles only through Component, RGB DTV, RGB PC, and RGB-DVI modes. Use it if you want to skip the Composite and S-video connections.
MENUS AND ADJUSTMENTS
There aren’t many parameters you can tweak on the KR-370TT. Four Picture Status Memory modes are yours for the tweaking – Dynamic, Standard, Mild, and User. (The first three sound like variations on hot sauces!) Within these menus, you will be able to make rudimentary image adjustments and save them, but don’t expect to find RGB drive/contrast and gain/bias adjustments.
Instead, you’ll have to be satisfied with one of 3 color temperature settings (Cool, Normal, and Warm). The ARC button on the remote takes care of cycling through all of the possible aspect ratios (16:9, 4:3, Zoom, Panorama). According to the manual, you can also adjust them from the Screen menu – that is, if you can actually find the Screen menu (I couldn’t).
The Sound menu lets you choose from four preset EQ curves, or define one of your own using a five-band graphic equalizer. In PC mode, you can choose one of four ‘XGA’ signal modes to optimize the display, and they are 1024x768, 1280x768 (the native resolution of this monitor), 1360x768, and 1366x768.
The KR-370T comes with an NTSC tuner that can tune off-air or cable signals. It memorizes channels pretty quickly, and you can save or delete channels as you wish. (No, this TV does not tuner in terrestrial digital TV signals, unfortunately). The PiP function lets you watch any two inputs – not channels – at the same time in different windows of your choosing. There’s even a preview window that displays 4 or 12 channels at once.
PERFORMANCE
For my tests, I took a cable feed for the NTSC input and connected DTV and HDTV signals through the component YPbPr and DVI-D interfaces from an LG LST-4200 set-top receiver and Motorola DCT6200 digital cable tuner. I also evaluated composite and component video performance with a Panasonic RP56 DVD player, using the Video Essentials and Realta HQV test DVDs.
First off, the KR-370T does an average job with composite video. Tests with the VI Zone Plate showed some detail at 300 lines but none at 400 lines, and color moiré was present in all fine detail. Using the S-video or component inputs or an outboard video scaler should solve that problem.
While the composite decoding performance is mediocre, the 3:2 film-to-video detection is actually quite good. Using the racecar sequence from Super Speedway on the Realta test DVD, I found the panel locked up 3:2 material within a split second – about as fast as my Panasonic DVD player, which is equipped with Faroudja DCDi processing.
Alas, the KR-370T’s de-interlacing performance left lots to be desired. There were plenty of scan line artifacts seen using the Realta rotating bar and waving flag sequences, as well in test video clips of bridge, buildings, and stadiums. The verdict? Skip the interlaced inputs and use an outboard scaler or quality progressive-scan DVD player.
I had slightly better results with HD content. I used clips from CBS’s HD telecast of The Young and The Restless and selected programs on Discovery HD to evaluate image sharpness, motion detail, and color accuracy. The KR-370T wasn’t really up to the task in any of these cases, although it was very happy with 720p material from ABC and ESPN HD.
One note: Although the DVI input is supposed to work with PC sources only, it will accept some DTV signals without copy protection. All 1080i and 720p off-air stations fed to the TV from the LG-LST3100 through the latter’s DVI connector showed up just fine, but premium networks like ESPN and Discovery would not display through the DCT6200 tuner.
NTSC images varied all over the place in image quality, probably because the internal video scaler has such a hard time cleanly decoding and de-interlacing composite video sources. Picture quality also suffers when there is noise present, as noise artifacts are also scaled up in resolution.
Figure 3. The KR-370T tracks a
very consistent grayscale.
The problem is, its color temperature is too high.
One big problem with the KR-370T is a red ‘push’ with HD signals, and there’s no way to dial it back from the menu. The lowest color temperature setting (Warm) still has enough magenta and blue in it to result in a reading of about 9,000 degrees K – much higher than the desired 6500 degrees K. Interestingly, the panel tracks a very consistent grayscale – it’s just too high in color temperature.
Motion sequences appeared soft and blurred for the most part, and that’s no surprise: fast motion has always been a bugaboo of LCD imaging technology. Pictures look a lot better with slow-moving or static scenes. So for travelogues or beauty shots of old cars, the KR-370T does very well. For the recent NCAA men’s basketball tournament, the KR-370T is breathing hard, trying to keep up.
Another big problem with this LCD TV is its low contrast. While the panel is plenty bright, cranking out 162 nits in Mild mode to 352 nits in Dynamic mode, the best contrast ratio I could measure in any mode was 78.7 ANSI (average) and 93.5 peak. These are disappointingly now numbers for any LCD TV these days – Sharp’s LC-26GD6U, reviewed elsewhere on this site, easily pulled numbers of 160:1 ANSI and 193:1 peak, which are about double the KR-370T’s performance.
The main reason is high black levels, which measured 3.7 to 3.8 nits on average in any picture mode. That’s double what you’d see from the best LCD TVs and not anything to write home about. An adjustable backlight would be a plus in this TV; you sure as heck don’t need all that brightness under low room lighting and picture contrast would improve.
CONCLUSION
While the KR-370T breaks new ground in pricing for this class of LCD TV, its performance suffers as a result in comparison to higher-priced models. You can get around the video scaling and decoding issues with an outboard scaler or set-top tuner, but you can’t escape the KR-370T’s problems with white balance, red push, and low contrast.
Unless you really want a big LCD on the cheap, I’d suggest spending the additional bucks to get one of Sharp’s 37-inch offerings (about $3300 to $4000) or opt for one of Sony or Panasonic’s 37-inch plasma TVs (from $2,999 to $3,999). You will be much happier with video quality, color saturation and contrast on any of those models.