The “Break it Down” Blog

After what seemed a stream of endless praise some folks getting the new 65831 sets are starting to notice a few things that are not settling well. The most damning is a few folks noticed after some quick testing major jaggies in images when being sent to the set in 1080i. The concern here is that the set is “bobbing and weaving”, meaning, it is actually down sampling the image to 540p then displaying it, getting rid of half the lines instead of processing them into a progressive-scanned image as they should be doing (Robert Heron provided a great link on this problem). The credit to this argument is that aparently last-years Mitsubishi sets all failed this test and used this dirty trick for interlaced signals.

There are also more folks noticing with their new sets artifacting in fast-pan scenes, but it hasn’t been determined yet if this is the source material fault (highly compressed SAT feed) for if it’s the TV. And a handful of people are consistently noticing SSE on the TV even though that was suppose to be one of the big selling points with the screen on this set.

To top that all off, one poor guy replaced his relatively new Toshiba RPTV with the 831 as a last minute upgrade only to have the TV end up looking terrible, and then the next day grind itself to death and blow a bulb while the light engine destroyed itself inside the TV.

I would like to balance out this information with the fact that the thread, for the folks that loved their TVs when they got them, is still basically a laundry list of why this TV is incredible. ‘little_trader‘ did a good job explaining just how amazing this set can look when viewing a good HD source.

My wife and I went out TV looking this weekend and ended up spending some time watching the WD-Y65, which I believe is some CircuitCity exclusive, and were floored by the image quality. The clarity and brightness are fantastic, but the Y65 is mostly comparable to the Mitsubishi WD-65732 and not the 831 for those of you interested. The 831 has the brighter buld, better screen and all the after-image processing filters, while the Y65 doesn’t (But for some reason retails for close to the 831).

If you were in the market for a RPTV and were looking at the 831, I would say keep looking at it. Play with it, watch it and heck, take it hope with a good return policy. If you don’t like it, return it and get something else.