The “Break it Down” Blog

Ok so I finally found a place in town that carries the Mitsubishi WD-65831, Roh’s Electronics “Where we charge you retail, because you are a sucker”. Ok that’s not really their tagline, but it should be.

I walked into Roh’s, which actually had a very high end layout/setup. Qualias, Pioneer Elites and the WD-65831. Many listening/viewing rooms. I would say if I didn’t care about deals and just wanted to get my setup taken care of, I’d probably go with them, but paying retail for A/V equipment is like playing over sticker for your car.

Fit and Finish

I went back and walked into the Mitsubishi viewing room, which had 5 or so Mits flat panel TVs on the wall, then last years 62XXX model behind me, then the WD-65831 against the longest wall. First impression, I love that finish. Second impression, we should get married.

More seriously though, the piano-black shiny finish is fantastic. In the pictures I originally didn’t like the matted/cloth cover on the speakers, but after seeing it in person it actually looked quite nice and is hard to even notice. The thin bezel around the frame of the picture is phenomenally (I had to look up the spelling of that word) executed in such a manner that there is this giant bright screen staring you in the face with this beautiful picture and you don’t really notice where exactly it’s comming from. I would also point out that the small frontal form factor gives the illusion that the TV is quite thin, it’s just as deep as any other RPTV on the market, but it is a nice touch.

I popped down the front panel and was welcomed to memory card slots for all the major memory card types except Compact Flash (from what I could tell) as well as all the manual controls. This is nicely tucked away behind a flip up door on the front.

Around back, as a lot of people have covered, is easy access to the input panel. I didn’t start tugging on spare drawers to see which one had the bulb in it as it wasn’t my TV, but I’m sure it was back there somewhere.

Around the other side near the fan it was warm, about as warm as a slide projector would get at your old high school or something like that. Basically anything with a super bright light source in it. The fan wasn’t even audible, but I could feel air. The TV had been on most of the day according to the sales rep and I left it on brilliant and stayed there for a while and never heard the fan kick it into over drive… so for all intents and purposes for any folks with XBox 360s or any other non-silent devices, I think this will be a non-issue. If you really hear the fan loudly, you may have a problem or your color wheel could be going bad. Call support.

Viewing Angles

The TV was on the accompanying Mitsubishi MB-65GB stand (17.5″ tall) and I had a stool to sit on that was on par with most normal couches hight, maybe 20″ or so high or in that ballpark? Anyway I tried the following viewing arrangements to see how I felt about the TV:

• 9′ away, on stool, center
• 11′ away, on stool, 65 degree right off-center
• 9′ away, on floor propped up on elbow, center
• 11′ away, on floor propped up on elbow, 65 degree right off-center

To clarify that a bit more, basically 2 positions dead-center, one on stool, one on floor and then 2 more positions way off center, about 65 degree viewing angle off to the right both on stool and on floor.

My initial impressions is that this TV is just as sensatives as every other RPTV to vertical position causing darkening of the pictures at the top or bottom of the screen (you know the effect where you get really close and are looking down at the picture and the top portion of it is darkened?). I assume this has something to do with the orientation of the mirrors, but it’s not a huge problem for us as our arrangement will always place us eye level with the TV, but we can be in 45 degrees offset from the center to the left or right.

So next I checked the off-center viewing and I was very pleasently surprised. At 65 degrees or so off from the center the picture was perfectly watchable. I tried to exaggerate the situation to see what our guests might see while they are sitting on our sectional and was very happy with the result. There was no degredation that used to be so common with rear project televisions.

Picture Quality

Ok the section most everyone probably scrolled down to read. The picture quality is phenominal. I didn’t see any SSE (I’m convinced now that I don’t know what that is… let’s just say I saw no distortions or discolorations in the image) or RBE in the picture. We watched ESPN in SD for a while so there was a lot of crap signal and fast action and honest it was totally acceptable to me. To the folks out there that expect an HD TV to make an SD signal look better… it’s just not going to happen. But for the realistic folks out there that just like watching TV for the content and not for the signal processing, this is perfectly fine.

Then we switched over to the Discovery HD channel (DirecTV) and it looks fantastic as you would expect. There was a special that travelled around the world and talked about the history of different places. The text on the screen talking about the different places was razor-sharp, I mean like computer-monitor sharp.

I played around with the image post-processing like edge enhancement, dark detailer and the mode of the picture (Natural, Bright, Brilliant) and have to say that while I liked how bright Brilliant was, there were two problems with it:

1. You burn through the life of your bulb probably 30% faster
2. It “blares” the colors out in some scenes, especially bright ones… think of HDR in Half Life 2 as an example, or the “bloom” effect in other games. In one scene we were looking at the forest and it looked fantastically… well brilliant… then we cut to a scene on a beach that had sun reflecting off the water and the reflection off the water was blooming/blaring it was so bright.

I didn’t like “Bright” mode for some reason the entire scene looked washed out, then again I didn’t switch to Bright, then go to the Brightness screen or the Contrast screen and trial and dial it back, so I might have liked it better. Honestly Natural was plenty bright for most cases. Maybe watching football in a big room with tons of windows, brilliant will look fantastic.

For anyone that historically has thought that RPTVs were dim (like the XBR1 series), I think you will want to stick with sets that have 180+ watt bulbs in them, like this set and the Sony XBR2 series (I’m sure JVC/Samsung have sets with it to, I just don’t know what they are). I personally like a bright picture, I’m not such a purish as others though.

Image Processing/Noise

Ok so the controversial topic of noise keeps coming up in AVS, and here’s the bottom line. You are going to see noise on ANY large/high-definition television that is processing a poor or overly compressed signal. This comes up in AVS a lot especially related to sports and fast-panning scenes, like a hockey game, football pass, or tennis. The problem is that not a lot of people realize just how over-compressed rebroadcast HD signals are from your providers (DirecTV, Dish Network, Comcast, Cox, etv.). OTA (Over the Air) HD and any HD from a media source like an HD-DVD or BluRay disk is going to be the best bet to see if the video processor in your TV actually has a problem with noise. In almost every single case where I’ve seen people complain about noise either in the Sony, Samsung or Mitsubishi thread, once they got a really strong source to play on their set, they noticed there was no noise.

So for folks like me that aren’t really bothered by noise, you will keep living your life happily. For folks that go crazy from noise, just make sure you live in an area that gets OTA HD and get yourself a strong antenna.

I watched a lot of the fast-panning scenes in that Discovery show and didn’t see much noise. One thing I did notice is that when I was playing with the settings, when I dialed the Sharpness setting all the way up not only did I see the graininess that is typical with that setting but I started to see quite a bit of blocking and noise in the image. After turning this down to about 20, everything looked nice and smooth. So for folks having noise problems, try dialing back your Sharpness.

Sound/Speaker Quality

For those audio gurus out there with your 1000 watt subwoofers, just skip over this part. For the folks out there (like me) that appreciate high end audio, but don’t spend the time/effort or money to invest in it and tend to use whatever speakers come with their TV, this section is for you.

The speakers on the 831 are spread across the bottom of the panel behind that matte/cloth area. In my listening they sounded fantastic compared to other CRT sets I’m around during the day. I turned them up to about 1/4 volumn and it was loud enough for me to feel uncomforatable having it so loud in a quiet A/V store, so I turned it back down a bit. Now this isn’t going to kill you with bass or deafen your neighbors with 90k hz sounds or anything like that, but if you are usually “pretty happy” with the default sound out of your TV, iPod, stereo, computer speakers, etc. I think these are probably going to sound “great” to you. Not real bass-heavy, but not tinny either. It’d say right in that sweet spot where I could easily be held over for a while before purchasing an accompanying sound system to go with the TV.

Conclusion

I loved the set and was very impressed with it. I will continue my quest to get this set and while my interest in seeing the Sony XBR2 is obviously still there just as much as anyone reading, with the seeming inability of Sony’s to stop screwing up on deliveries, technology and marketing of their devices I have to wonder… do I want a $6k commitment to Sony when they can’t seem to even release a new disk format, player, console, TV, etc?