Samsung 61-inch DLP HDTV

Samsung HLN617W 61-inch DLP HDTV Review

By Grant Clauser

There's an end of a rope somewhere with "CRT television" written on it, and that end is quickly coming closer. For the most part, the TVs in America's homes these days are based on cathode ray tubes (CRT) invented when Grover Cleveland was president. Now that we're well into our second Bush administration, we're finding other ways to watch the evening news and The West Wing. Among the latest successors to the CRT are displays based on Digital Light Processing (DLP) technology.

Samsung's flagship rear-projection television, the HLN617W, is a widescreen HDTV-ready DLP television with the works. Like the many front projectors E-Gear has reviewed, the new Samsung is based on a panel of tiny mirrors built by Texas Instruments (TI). This model is one of the first to include what's known as the HD2 Digital Micromirror (DMD) chip, the second generation of high-definition resolution DLP chips made by TI. This chip differs from the HD1 in a very subtle way — the tilt angle of its micromirrors is slightly deeper, thereby throwing away excess light more efficiently than did the HD1. (The first DLP rear projection TVs, offered two years ago by Panasonic, Mitsubishi and Hitachi, employed the HD1.)

Of course, you don't really need to know there's a bank of little mirrors inside the TV, just as you don't need to know there's an inert gas getting claustrophobic inside a plasma TV. What you do need to know is that DLP works. Each of those tiny mirrors pivots on a hinge at a speed greater than that of a humming bird's wings (5,000 times per second), to create a screen image 1,280 pixels across by 720 pixels high. That accounts for the 720p resolution, as apposed to the 1,080i resolution found in most rear-projection TVs. Can you tell the difference? Not in my opinion. While 1,080i sounds like more, it actually places fewer lines on the screen at once because it's an interlaced format, and 720p uses progressive scanning.

DLP projection gives you a few significant benefits over CRT. First, CRT and plasma TVs use phosphors in their tubes. In time, especially if you're driving the tubes too hard by setting the brightness high, the phosphors will fade, thereby degrading picture quality. Still images, such as the bars from letterbox movies or graphics from video games, also can be indelibly burned into the phosphors. (You'd have to work on it, but it does happen.) DLP has none of those problems. There are no phosphors to age or burn. There are occasionally panels on which a mirror becomes stuck, but that's rare. According to a knowledgeable friend at TI, DLP chips have a very high reliability factor. If chips are going to fail, they fail before they get out of the factory.

The other leg up DLP has on CRT, as well as most LCD and LCoS rear-projection sets, is that it isn't subject to convergence issues. I've spent a lot of time in front of CRT rear projectors aligning the red, blue and green tubes to get an accurately converged picture. DLP colors are created with a color wheel, spinning at a constant rate, so one color can't drift off-target. If you've ever seen colored edges around images on a rear-projection TV, that's the result of poor convergence.

Samsung has gone out of its way to stack the cards in favor of this TV. Its prime features include the exceptional Faroudja DCDi scaler/deinterlacer, multiple aspect ratio controls, a host of video inputs (three component inputs, DVI, computer RGB, S-Video, plus RS232 for control systems) and a proprietary video enhancer called the Digital Natural Image engine (DNIe). Both the DCDi scaler and DNIe processing were primarily designed to make all non-high-definition TV sources look better. DCDi scales and reinterprets a lower resolution image to fit the high resolution of the Samsung television. The DNIe performs several tricks, including 3-D noise reduction, and detail and contrast enhancement.

The TV's controls are deftly hidden on the side of the cabinet, so they don't muck up the attractive front. The remote is small but serviceable, and can be programmed to control your VCR, cable box and DVD player. Auxiliary inputs for camcorders and video games are also on the side, out of sight. The back panel contains all the important input jacks, the most important for an HDTV being the three sets of component inputs and the DVI jack. Two of the component inputs will accept high-definition signals, and all three will take a 480p signal from a progressive scan DVD player. If you have a high-definition tuner with a DVI output, such as Samsung's SIR-T165, use the DVI jack for an uncompressed signal. A 1394 (FireWire) jack would have been a nice addition, but at this point in the high-def input debate, DVI is the more important and more universally supported standard. Most cable HD boxes still use component inputs, as do the JVC and Marantz high-def VCRs.

The HLN617W includes all the features typical of better tele-visions, including picture-in-picture, auto-tuning, parental control options and Virtual Dolby processing. But all that functionality doesn't make the TV difficult to use. Video controls include basic contrast, brightness, sharpness, color and tint, plus three color- temperature settings. There are a few video presets, labeled dynamic, movie, standard and custom. Changing any of the video values automatically places the TV in custom mode. The film mode option turns 3:2 inverse telecine on or off, which senses and corrects for film frame rates. You can also switch the DNIe on or off or into a demo mode, which splits the screen between DNIe on and off. If you try this, you'll see that the DNIe side is much brighter and more detailed than the non-DNIe side. Generally, I preferred to leave DNIe in the on position. Many of the advanced features are controlled easily from the remote. Picture-in-picture, aspect ratio, DNIe and surround audio mode all have their own dedicated buttons. One control feature I didn't like was the input selection. To change inputs from DVD component to satellite S-Video, for example, you need to press the TV/video button, which sends you to a menu of inputs you navigate with a remote joystick. This is a bit tedious, and it's a real challenge when programming a universal learning remote.

Because this is a DLP TV, I opted to watch the Star Wars Episode II — Attack of the Clones DVD, which was created digitally and shown in many theaters on commercial-grade versions of the DLP technology driving this unit. Overall, I liked the picture I got from the DVD (played on a Pioneer Elite DVD player). Bright and colorful scenes looked brilliant. The TV's detail was rich; skin, even alien skin, looked remarkably lifelike. Dark scenes, however, were plagued by black levels not as robust as you'd find on CRT TVs. The weaker black levels in dark areas made the picture a little less punchy, and there were the occasional blotches of false contouring common among plasma monitors. Yoda's big fight scene near the end of the movie suffered from this. Keeping the contrast and color control set low produced the best results for me. Artifacts created by MPEG2 compression were effectively minimized by the Faroudja scaler.

After previewing a few movies, I switched to HDTV using Samsung's SIR-T165 tuner. In the middle of the day there isn't much to watch off of an antenna in Philadelphia (E-Gear's office location), but I was able to pull in a high-def soap opera as well as a demonstration program on a local PBS channel. High definition looked superb, with vibrant colors, sharp detail and more solid blacks and shadows.

As this TV demonstrates, DLP is a great technology for both front- and rear-projection displays. After another presidency or two, we'll probably see the last of the CRT television, and I for one won't miss it.

Samsung HLN617W 61-inch DLP HDTV
$5,999
High definition-ready
720p native resolution
Faroudja DCDi video processing
108 pounds
www.samsungusa.com


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