Worth the money, a few quirks, nothing major

I have had the TV for about 2 months now.

The good
Excellent black levels and extremely crisp picture, no rainbow effects whatsoever
Upconversion to 1080p is excellent quality and virtually no latency – in fact, standard definition broadcast upconverted and stretched to 72” screen looks a LOT better then the same broadcast stretched to my 32” 16:9 Cathode tube HDTV.

As with all DLPs the TV itself is very light (about 4x lighter then my cathode tube:))

The unknown
Cant speak for TV sound as I have THX receiver in place is simply do not use internal speakers.

The unfortunate
The first time my cat saw it, it got confused with discovery channels’ landscape and tried to “jump in” – poor creature had an eye opening experience when she bounced off the screen.

The useless
SD memory card to view pictures – I could never understand people that buy a cell phones or IPODS with video playing capabilities. Equally, I don’t know who would use SD memory card slot for picture viewing – to me it seems useless.

TV Guide – there should be an option to get rid of this useless feature; - every major cable and satellite provider has on demand programming guide; why do I need to have an extra button on remote ….



The annoying

This was my first venture into DLP TV, previous HDTV was a 32” Toshiba cathode tube; with this one I quickly realized TV software has no way of detecting true DVD format – over analog component connection. Whether playing 3:4 or 16:9 DVD the picture will start up in 4:3 mode with information screen showing 480p resolution. That’s great unless the DVD is anamorphic, in that case manual intervention is required – picture size needs to be manually set to “Full Screen” as opposed to “Native”. This problem might go away if connected through pure digital (HDMI) connection – if someone has the details on that pleas drop me a note – my receiver doesn’t support HDMI, hence I could not test it.

The remote back lights make high pitch mosquito-like noise; I tough that remote only once per session so it doesn’t matter much to me.

The bad
There seems to be a weird issue related to color wheel noise, might be my unit specifically, although based on the online reviews a few people had that attributed to “fan noise”

As with every major piece of equipment there is a power supply fan – in my instance that one is quite, however I have had situations (fairly consistent) where much louder noise would start – that one was loud enough to be rather annoying. At first I thought it was power supply fan, but after poking around a bit, I’m fairly certain it is color wheel. The easiest way to check it was to change theater white format and hear the noise fluctuate on change (color wheel needs to resynchronize). After I have disabled warm reboot of the tv, and made it power off completely every time I press the power button, the issue was no more. Still, for an expansive piece of electronics that this thing is - I should not have to deal with it.

Finally, I have paid $3570 for the TV from 6th Ave Electronics store (this is whole other story); hence I think it was a good buy; if I were to pay $5000+ as some stores sell, it I might have had a different attitude.