VIZIO Offers Brave New World Of TV Quality With 37-Inch LCD

By Mike McGann
Posted Friday, February 2, 2007

Damned if anyone saw this coming. Certainly not the traditional makers of televisions, who seemed to cling to the cathode ray tube like it was a life-support line and then rushed to embrace plasma.

But LCD, liquid crystal display, was there all along and few took it seriously. Few, but not everyone. I remember seeing a 37-inch LCD screen in Korea in 1997 at a Samsung factory — it was a prototype and acted like one, but it wasn’t much worse than contemporary plasma displays and better than some I’d seen at that point. But LCD was in millions of laptops, screens which were steadily getting bigger, brighter and faster.

While the most of the big companies slept, humped CRTs and plasmas, Sony, Samsung and Sharp being among the few exceptions, a bunch of new companies saw the future and created new brands — some of which have been amazingly successful. VIZIO, unknown at the start of the 21st Century, is now the best-known of these new brands.

After spending six weeks with VIZIO’s VX37L LCD HDTV, I understand why VIZIO has jumped to the front of the class. With a suggested retail price of $899 — a bit more than half of what you’d expect to pay for a similar Sony or Sharp LCD TV — plus a year of in-home warranty repairs, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the value proposition. The question, then, is what do you give up by selecting the less expensive option?

In short: not much. Having tested and calibrated any number of TVs over the years, I was startled at the quality of the out of the box performance of this TV and found very little to be disappointed about.

Coming out of the box, there’s nothing cheap feeling or looking about this set: it’s simple and elegant in appearance. The VIZIO logo is lit up in the bezel below the screen. When the set is off, it’s orange, white when the set is off — and while it might have a few purists up in arms, its something Sony was doing five years ago, and a lot of people still think it is cool. I never found it distracting while watching the set.

Starting with the box — the set comes ready to go right out of the box, no need to attach the stand. Plug in your power cable and your inputs and an antenna and you’re good to go. For a small TV, it has a ton of inputs: two component inputs, an HDMI input and a VGA computer style input, along with S-Video and composite video. As you might imagine, real estate is kind of tight on the back of 37-inch set, but the inputs are pretty well laid out and well-marked.

Prior to calibrating the set, I gave it some break-in time; it’s probably less important to do it with an LCD than with older CRT-style sets (or even plasmas), but it gave me time to test out the internal ATSC tuner. Putting it bluntly, it’s really good — not what you might expect on a “value” brand. Surprisingly, the NTSC tuner, largely a cheap piece in any modern TV, performs better than is typical, even among high-priced brands.

The basic controls of the set are well-designed, as is the user interface. It’s pretty easy to figure out where everything is and normal people can confidently operate this TV without taking night classes at the local engineering school. The back-lit remote is okay, not spectacular, but a couple of notches above the typical “value” TV.

Of course, none of this would be shocking to those reading up about VIZIO on the ‘Net. While initially they were sold through warehouse stores, recently adding distribution through some of the big box electronics retailers, VIZIO TVs quickly got a reputation for being sturdy, solid TVs, something like the TV version of a Toyota Corolla.

A few hours of out of the box use of the set reenforced that opinion. The HDTV images on the set were striking, causing even jaded types used to HD to stop and stare. The set was a bit bright and over saturated out of the box. I fixed that after about 20 hours of use, allowing for break-in time, with a copy of Digital Video Essentials and I set the TV to the “warm” color temperature setting out of long-standing habit.

Those comparisons to a Toyota held up only until I unleashed my Sencore CP 5000 color analyzer on the VIZIO — and the results were a big surprise.

First off, the color settings were basically correct, which is the first time I ever encountered such a thing. That means the ‘Warm” setting actually compares well to the computer and film standard of 5400K (for you non-tech heads; the lower the temperature number, the redder the color of gray. An ideal color TV should be set at 6500K, although black and white films look best using the 5400K setting). Out of the box, the set was a bit warmer than the 5400K, but surprisingly close, as most TVs sold at retail are much cooler, or bluer, to look better under store lighting. The “Normal” setting was a bit warm out of the box, too, drifting toward red higher in the IRE scale (IRE is a 0 to 100 scale of gray, from black to white), so bright images had a very slight red cast. The “cool” setting was bluer than the standard, at about 8,600K, much closer to what I’ve seen as a “warm” setting on other TVs.

Once calibrated, I was able to narrow out some of the drift, but still found a variation of 6303K at 0 IRE to 6604K at 100 IRE in the normal setting, that’s a bit more drift than I’d prefer, but it was linear and progressive. I’ve seen better, a few times, and worse much more often.

The VX37L fared pretty well on my suite of test patterns, including a batch of 720 progressive patterns run from my PowerBook. The patterns revealed the typical shortcomings of LCD panels: murky blacks and a slight softness in detail.

Watching video via DVD, I noticed the same issue on a number of the discs I typically use to torture sets. The DVDs for the series Firefly, with its dark moody lighting, sudden switches to bright exteriors and action sequences are among my favorite for abusing LCD TVs. I noticed loss of black detail on virtually all of the shots inside the ship, but it wasn’t terrible, and in line what I’ve seen from other displays. I didn’t notice much in the way of pixel lag, which is very evident in some displays.

Among LCDs, I’d rate this display as being above average when you take all of the various measured results into account. You might get better performance from some plasmas, although they, too have their drawbacks (fast-motion blocking and burn-in tend to still be issues) and you might pay a weight and product-life penalty. That’s where the Toyota comparison falls away — this is more like a Honda, sturdy, a good value, but with more performance aspirations.

If this set retailed for $1,599, it would be a solid contender in the segment. At $899, it’s a no-brainer. There are other products at or slightly higher than this price point in the marketplace, but to be honest, some of that product is junk, while this is not. This is a bit like getting Honda performance and build quality at Yugo pricing. It doesn’t take much time with it to get wildly enthusiastic about the VX37L.

I can’t say this for sure, but it seems like the folks at VIZIO targeted Sony in terms of performance, build quality and overall look and feel. For the most part, they hit the target again and again. When it comes to the areas where they didn’t quite reach the mark, consumers can console themselves with the fact that the price is only slightly more than half of a similar Sony TV.

If VIZIO is the future of the TV business, based on the VX37L LCD HDTV, consumers and video enthusiasts have a great deal to look forward to in the coming years.