PRODUCT REVIEW: OCTOBER 26, 2007
Vizio Gallevia GV52LF LCD HDTV
VIZIO’s Gallevia GV52LF has the lowest price ($2,299) of any 52-inch LCD HDTV available today. Is it really that good a deal? That depends…
By now, you’ve probably heard of VIZIO, one of the most aggressive discounters of plasma and LCD HDTV products in today’s consumer marketplace. Starting out at discount clubs Costco and Sam’s Club, VIZIO has established a stronghold in Circuit City and Wal-Mart as well.
VIZIO’s marketing strategy is simple — drive value to consumers with feature-packed “hot” TV products and accessories. Keep costs down and pass savings along to the buyer, and offer strong warranty programs and “white glove” delivery and installation as an option.
The last VIZIO product I reviewed, the P50HDM 50-inch plasma monitor, turned out to be a great deal and a strong performer. It didn’t have the best video processing, but it was much better than I expected and also had good black levels and contrast and decent color rendering.
The GV52LF has quite a legacy to follow, as a result. Given that it’s also a full 1920x1080 resolution product, it faces stiff challenges in producing clean video from a variety of sources, analog and digital.
Figure 1. VIZIO’s Gallevia GV52LF has an impressive appearance.
OUT OF THE BOX
As shipped, the GV52LF is a “plug and play” product. All you need do is hook up your AV components, connect an antenna to the RF jack, turn it on, and you’re ready to go. As usual, VIZIO provides their industry-unique and oversized fold-out setup guide that provides clear, concise connection and operation instructions, along with color-coded identification of all controls and connectors.
The TV itself has an attractive piano-black finish on its bezel, while the supporting stand has a silver accent. Two removable speaker arrays sit to either side of the stand, below the TV’s frame, thereby saving space to the left and right of the TV. Personally, I’d prefer an all-black design, similar to what Samsung uses these days — it just looks cooler.
If you want lots of connectors, the GV52LF won’t disappoint. In addition to a pair of composite video jacks and one S-video jack, there are two separate component (YPbPr) inputs and a 15-pin VGA-style jack for connection to a PC or an older set-top box. There are also four — yep, that’s right, four — HDMI jacks.
For audio connections, each AV input has stereo RCA jacks, while the VGA input uses a standard 1/8” mini phone jack. The HDMI jack field also has a pair of RCA stereo audio inputs for use with early-generation HDMI set-top boxes that didn’t carry digital audio. The audio output panel has a Toslink connection for your home theater AV receiver, plus a stereo analog output.
A single F-connector completes the picture, and here is where you’d hook up either an antenna for digital/analog terrestrial (VSB) TV reception, or a cable TV connection for analog and unscrambled digital (QAM) TV signals. You can’t use both modes unless you hook up a separate terrestrial DTV or cable DTV set-top box to one of the HDMI or component inputs.
Keep in mind that, when connected to a cable TV system, you won’t receive any program guide information with cable-only networks. Instead, you’ll have to flip through the digital cable channels picked up during a channel scan and make a log of what they turn out to be. It’s a bit of a nuisance, but you should be able to get your local digital channels and major broadcast networks in the clear.
Figure 2. The remote control is large, but very user-friendly for those with big fingers.
REMOTE AND MENUS
VIZIO has re-designed their remote since my last review. It’s a larger, easier-to-use layout with just about the right number of buttons. Although you can’t change directly to any input, you can select a group of like inputs (AV, Component, HDMI) and navigate from there.
There’s also a numeric keypad for direct channel access and extra buttons for controlling a DVD player, AV receiver, or cable box. You can also pick four favorite channels and save them to color-coded buttons for fast retrieval.
The Guide button will provide you with exactly that — program guide (EPG) info if the data bits are being sent by the DTV station. In general, you’ll only have EPG info if the station’s call letters are seen when you change channels — cable-only channels use a different format for program guide information that the GV52LF can’t read.
In terms of menu adjustments, there are plenty to fiddle with. In addition to basic image adjustments, you can also toggle between four color temperature settings (Warm, Normal, Cool, and User with RGB adjustments), or jump into the Advanced menu where you’ll find Digital Noise Reduction, Black Level Extension, Peak White Limiting, Color Transient Correction, Flesh Tone boost, Adaptive Luma enhancement, and a Dynamic Contrast Ratio (DCR) on-off circuit.
In the Audio menu, you can set volume, bass, treble, and balance, plus turn on/off the Surround mode and enable/disable the speakers. The TV menu lets you select the antenna hookup and scan for channels, choose between PCM or Dolby Digital output mode, and select your time zone. Additional menu settings are provided for analog (EIA608) and digital (EIA708) closed captions, picture in picture, and H/V image position.
ON THE TEST BENCH
The GV52LF is a lot of TV, so I prepared a battery of tests for it that included test patterns from my AccuPel generator, the Realta HQV red-laser and blue-laser DVDs, and a few HD DVD and Blu-ray titles including Batman Begins (deep blacks) and Charlie And The Chocolate Factory (saturated colors).
I also viewed selected SD and HD programs from CBS, ABC, NBC, FOX, Discovery, and ESPN. For upscaling comparisons, I used test patterns from Video Essentials and the red-laser Realta HQV disc played back on OPPO’s DV-981 and 970 DVD players.
Right off the bat, I ran into a problem with the cable TV channel scan. While it picked up most of the local HDTV channels, it didn’t read KYW’s virtual channel information (3-1) correctly and instead plopped it right around channel 26, which is the station’s physical (RF) channel. There’s no way to edit or re-scan a single channel in the GV52LF’s menu, so I’d have to re-scan all channels again to fix the problem.
The terrestrial analog/digital TV scan worked much better and took far less time as there aren’t nearly as many active channel to scan. This time around, KYW-DT showed up where it should have been, parked on 3-1. All other local DTV channels also placed correctly, and electronic program guide was available for every station transmitting it.
After calibration for best grayscale — quite a task, as you’ll see momentarily — I measured image brightness at a blinding 367 nits in Custom image mode. That number didn’t change much as I cycled through Standard (358 nits) to Movie (289 nits) and Game (364 nits) modes. The GV52LF just wants to push out the photons, something you can control a bit by cutting back on the backlight level.
Black levels look high on this set and my contrast measurements bore that out with readings of 231:1 ANSI (average) and 273:1 peak, thanks to an average black level reading of 1.5 nits. That’s 10 times as bright as the .15 nits black readings I’ve gotten from Panasonic and Pioneer plasma TVs.
Figure 3. This RGB Levels histogram shows blue levels are too high to start
and take off again midway up the grayscale.
Figure 4. As a result, the color temperature plots aren’t too impressive.
The grayscale calibration is tricky because the GV52LF’s color temperature wanders all over the place. In the factory Normal mode, the color temperature at 50 IRE measures 9676 Kelvin and varies by a whopping 1505 Kelvin from 20 to 100 IRE. I tried several calibrations to tame it, but the best I could do was 6563K at 50 IRE with a maximum excursion of 3993 Kelvin from 20 to 100 IRE.
The reason for this is the blue color channel doesn’t track consistently across a grayscale, something I was able to plot with an RGB Levels Histogram (Figure 3) in ColorFacts 6.0. Blue is over-saturated up to about 30 IRE, then takes off again at 50 IRE to where it is almost 20% higher in level than the green channel. Figure 4 shows the actual color temperature tracks, none of which are anything to write home about.
As a result, I didn’t expect to see a very stable gamma curve, and I wasn’t disappointed (Figure 5). My first attempt at throttling back brightness to lower black levels resulted in a curve that took off like a rocket from 50 IRE. My second attempt wasn’t much better, although I did get it to a more reasonable 2.63. (The original factory settings worked out to about 1.9, but way too bright with evidence of white crush.)
Figure 5. These gamma curves are all over the place, but my last calibration turned out best.
Figure 6. After all that, the GV52LF has a nice color gamut for an LCD HDTV!
Figure 6 shows the plotted color gamut, which considering all the other problems I just listed, isn’t too shabby. The magenta, blue, and yellow color coordinates are right on the money, with red under-saturated and green shifted a bit too much towards cyan. You’ll see lots of pleasing colors on the GV52LF, but those high black levels keep many color shades from being richer than they could be.
VIDEO IMAGE QUALITY
Alas, the GV52LF isn’t much better at producing clean, scaled video images than it is at tracking a stable grayscale. Although the 3:2 detection circuit works nicely (a bit slowly, but consistent), the GV52LF cannot handle any of the other oddball cadences on the Realta HQV red laser test disc. Nor does it handle interlaced standard definition content very well; the waving flag and rotating bars were full of jagged, aliased edges.
The HD DVD Realta disc showed that the GV52LF’s 1080i processing is of the more common and less expensive “bobbing” type, resulting in beaucoup flicker during the film resolution loss test and more jaggies in the video resolution loss test. There’s no way to fix any of this as none of the Advanced Menu controls provide a solution. I strongly suggest you turn the Sharpness control to 1 or 0 when viewing any content, even SD, which scales softly as expected but is tolerable.
Tests with OPPO’s DV981 showed it to have far superior 480i-to-1080p scaling. Gone were all of the aliased artifacts from the Realta DVD, along with motion errors. As a result, I strongly suggest using a 1080p scaling DVD player with the GV52LF, or if you’re ready to take the plunge, an HD DVD or Blu-ray player with 1080p/60 output. (The GV52LF won’t accept 1080p/24 signals.)
Unfortunately, even 720p HDTV from ESPN, ABC, and FOX didn’t look as sharp as it could have. The best results were seen with native 1080i broadcasts from CBS, NBC, and Discovery, fed through either the component or HDMI inputs. That’s probably because little image scaling is going on, just deinterlacing. The HDMI connection is preferred, although the GV52LF’s analog HD frequency response is quite good to 20–22 MHz
Batman Begins had nice color, but low-luminance picture detail was lost in those high black levels. The problem is aggravated by the GV52LF’s narrow viewing angles — if you get more than 45 degrees to either side of the screen, or above/below the centerline, the blacks will wash out. You may also see lighter areas at different points on the screen.
Charlie And The Chocolate Factory has some of the most eye-popping colors you’ll see in a movie, and with the best projectors and plasma displays, you’ll get hungry watching all of the cherry-red apples, lush green candy grass, and rich milk chocolate. That doesn’t happen with the GV52LF — the colors become less saturated at lower levels of gray, and Johnny Depp’s somewhat sallow skin color looks downright ghostly.
CONCLUSIONS
While the GV52LF looks like a sensational deal, there is a definite caveat emptor. You must drive this HDTV with native 1080p content to get the best image quality out of it. 1080i broadcasts aren’t too bad, as long as they are mostly prime-time film-style shows and not live sports with lots of movement.
Standard DVDs scaled to 1080p externally hold up much better than if the GV52LF has to do the heavy lifting, and standard-definition cable and analog TV is quite soft when viewed on this HDTV (but resist the temptation to crank up that sharpness control anyway!)
The wacky grayscale tracking means you won’t have consistent color temperatures across the screen, and the brightness setting is just too high. For your reference, 100 nits equals about 29 foot-Lamberts, what you’d see out of a conventional CRT TV set and adequate for daytime viewing.
In contrast, the GV52LF produces three times that level of brightness, which is bound to cause eye fatigue in a darkened room and also washes out black levels, thereby de-saturating colors and reducing contrast “pop.” VIZIO should be able to throttle back the setting to well under 200 nits, which would help picture quality tremendously.
As for the video artifacts, better processors are out there, but they would raise the retail price of this HDTV by a few hundred dollars. To sum up, the GV52LF looks impressive cosmetically and is indeed a tremendous bargain, but delivers below-average video performance.
