My Bro-in-Law blew some serious coin on a 75" Mitsubishi Laservue and invited me over to check out his new toy while my sister spent most of the time moaning about the price. Actually his reasons were a bit more sinister because having some background in color analysis I'm pretty good at tweaking in new sets without the aid of color tools. I kinda knew this going over there, but I was curious about the new beast from Mitsubishi and really just wanted to relax, drink some beer, and help him crack the plaster with some Blue-Ray mindless action. I should have known better.
First impressions - not good. Well, the thing is bright, and very sharp. Rivals theatrical DLP in that department while lacking motion artifacts as small as they may be with that level of DLP. The Mitsi also has a habit of raising every possible defect in source material to annoying levels. It has to be better than this. I spent a day letting bro-in-law brag about the picture quality and browsing through menu settings and spent the night planning my attack.
I stopped over the next day; 'look, the set looks good, but it can be better'. He was deflated a bit, but he knew I was more likely right than wrong. He tossed me the remote and I went to work assuring him I can always go back to his preset if need be. Most reviewers are sticking to the 'brilliant' or 'bright' preset, which I found horrid and planned on making an example of a few hours down the road.
First problem were the reds. A few reviewers have complained the Mitsi blows out reds in the default presets, and this was a poster child example. Initially I thought the set lacked color saturation, but while mid level colors were dull and lacked dimension a few specific gamut ranges of red would blow your eyes out. Broadcast, Blue-Ray, didn't matter. for this reason I decided to dispense with tweaking the factory presets and just go into the custom modes and start fresh. It took awhile, but after about an hour of tweaking all the color matrixes I was able to drastically improve the color issues and eliminated the red problem entirely. Most of the issues seemed to be in the non RGB channels; yellow/magenta/cyan. This is interesting considering there is no YMC lasers in the Mitsi, correct? This would imply an overlap (or worse) in color assignment and why specific colors like red exponentially blew out on certain ranges. It's my theory at least, and I'm sticking to it
What I basically did was toggle through an array of source material ranging from Ninja Assasin on his Oppo to calibrate black detail levels to 'Avatar' to 'A-team' and any other recent vid source. I avoid network news shows because they typically use too much make-up and this creates a bad calibration. The Mitsi (thank god) was very linear in terms of color coming from various sources, although a lot of this has to be attributed to Oppo doing it's job.
Once we got color sorted out, we switched to the Mitsi's sharpness/detail enhancements, which I normally hate having on with any set. Having any of them eabled created an issue with the Oppo, and the result was tremendous levels of grey/black artifacts and edge problems. The Mitsi also also lacks sufficient tweaking of some of the controls with your choices being 'off' or 'YouTube'. Had the Mitsi prodvided finer tuning of these settings they might not be so bad. In any respect, we found having some of these settings enabled for broadcast (Comcast - his choice) worked fine, and even for On Demand selections with even 'Avatar' picking up some missing detail and looking stunning. However, the Oppo clearly doesn't like the Mitsi doing this post processing junk and we left it off. Now for the proof - we toggled back to the preset 'Brilliant' and I watched with complete satisfaction the level of disgust on his face. The factory preset was clearly 'unwatchable' by any imagination compared to my tweaking.
The short form is that this an incredible set that once calibrated delivered astonishing levels of brightness and color detail. It *is* that good. I'm tough to impress, and even I was impressed with what the expensive Mitsi was capable of doing once tweaked in. The better news is it was able to be tweaked in without colorimeters and by using good eyeballs and savy. The bad news is obviously that the factory defaults suck to that extent, and online reviews are clearly using them. Cool set - wish I had them money for one
First impressions - not good. Well, the thing is bright, and very sharp. Rivals theatrical DLP in that department while lacking motion artifacts as small as they may be with that level of DLP. The Mitsi also has a habit of raising every possible defect in source material to annoying levels. It has to be better than this. I spent a day letting bro-in-law brag about the picture quality and browsing through menu settings and spent the night planning my attack.
I stopped over the next day; 'look, the set looks good, but it can be better'. He was deflated a bit, but he knew I was more likely right than wrong. He tossed me the remote and I went to work assuring him I can always go back to his preset if need be. Most reviewers are sticking to the 'brilliant' or 'bright' preset, which I found horrid and planned on making an example of a few hours down the road.
First problem were the reds. A few reviewers have complained the Mitsi blows out reds in the default presets, and this was a poster child example. Initially I thought the set lacked color saturation, but while mid level colors were dull and lacked dimension a few specific gamut ranges of red would blow your eyes out. Broadcast, Blue-Ray, didn't matter. for this reason I decided to dispense with tweaking the factory presets and just go into the custom modes and start fresh. It took awhile, but after about an hour of tweaking all the color matrixes I was able to drastically improve the color issues and eliminated the red problem entirely. Most of the issues seemed to be in the non RGB channels; yellow/magenta/cyan. This is interesting considering there is no YMC lasers in the Mitsi, correct? This would imply an overlap (or worse) in color assignment and why specific colors like red exponentially blew out on certain ranges. It's my theory at least, and I'm sticking to it
What I basically did was toggle through an array of source material ranging from Ninja Assasin on his Oppo to calibrate black detail levels to 'Avatar' to 'A-team' and any other recent vid source. I avoid network news shows because they typically use too much make-up and this creates a bad calibration. The Mitsi (thank god) was very linear in terms of color coming from various sources, although a lot of this has to be attributed to Oppo doing it's job.
Once we got color sorted out, we switched to the Mitsi's sharpness/detail enhancements, which I normally hate having on with any set. Having any of them eabled created an issue with the Oppo, and the result was tremendous levels of grey/black artifacts and edge problems. The Mitsi also also lacks sufficient tweaking of some of the controls with your choices being 'off' or 'YouTube'. Had the Mitsi prodvided finer tuning of these settings they might not be so bad. In any respect, we found having some of these settings enabled for broadcast (Comcast - his choice) worked fine, and even for On Demand selections with even 'Avatar' picking up some missing detail and looking stunning. However, the Oppo clearly doesn't like the Mitsi doing this post processing junk and we left it off. Now for the proof - we toggled back to the preset 'Brilliant' and I watched with complete satisfaction the level of disgust on his face. The factory preset was clearly 'unwatchable' by any imagination compared to my tweaking.
The short form is that this an incredible set that once calibrated delivered astonishing levels of brightness and color detail. It *is* that good. I'm tough to impress, and even I was impressed with what the expensive Mitsi was capable of doing once tweaked in. The better news is it was able to be tweaked in without colorimeters and by using good eyeballs and savy. The bad news is obviously that the factory defaults suck to that extent, and online reviews are clearly using them. Cool set - wish I had them money for one