I just finished setting up and testing my new Westinghouse Digital LVM-37W1 LCD monitor. Initial impression is very positive.
This monitor (no built-in tuner) has 1920X1080 resolution for native 1080i capability, 1000:1 contrast ratio, 550 cd/m2 brightness and 12ms pixel response time, and built-in Faroudja line doubler and video up-converter (all incoming signals are up-converted to 1080p) Dual DVI inputs (one for 1080i and one for 1080p) as well as the normal array of composite, s-video, 2 component inputs, VGA input and various audio inputs, PIP, inverse 3:2 pulldown.... Not bad for $2000.
The out-of-the-box display settings are dismal, as is the users manual (nearly useless) and the chintzy remote control. A quick run through the on-screen display controls told me much more than the owner's manual did (although I still don't know what the three color temperature settings are calibrated to.) After using my THX Optimizer to adjust the screen, the image quality went from "What kind of crappy picture is this?" to "WOW, this is WAY better than my projector!" Color saturation is very deep and quality is true (I used the first five minutes of "Frida" and one of the action scenes from "The Incredibles" to judge colors after calibration with NTSC color bars.) Blacks are deep and not gray, which is great for an LCD and very impressive for any flat panel, although true B&W images (like my copy of the original "Cape Fear") tend toward bluish. I suppose this could have been caused by the mysterious color temp. calibrations as I forgot to play with them on monochrome images. Oh well, after ten seconds the very minor blue shift became unnoticable.
I detected no streaking or color bleed on either deeply saturated or fast moving images. Interestingly, with my Phillips progressive scan DVD player, the monitor seems to prefer 480i to 480p component input. The Faroudja de-intelacer worked flawlessly with no perceptable time lag or lip sync delay. The 480i component signal was noticably superior to S-video, but the s-vid signal was better than when I switched to progressive output. Might be my DVD player....
I connected my new Oppo DVD player via DVI to the 1080i input and the quality was astounding, although interestingly I got the best quality (by eyeball) by setting the DVD player output to 780p and connecting to the DVIp input rather than 1080i to 1080i. The difference was slight, but noticable (to me. My wife - who is a visual artist and usually has the more discriminating eye - preferred the 1080i signal.) I wonder if the Oppo output was having trouble scaling to 1080, or if the two scalers were fighting each other... or if it is just me. I will play around more with this.
I tried connecting my laptop to the VGA input and yes, the screen works as a large video monitor as long as your video card can output a high resolution image, so gamers will be happy. I am not one of those, however, so can only tell you that at 1280x1024 a Photoshop image file looked grand.
In any case, I am very pleased with the screen and it is pushing me toward my DirectTV HD Tivo upgrade - at least sometime before football season.
Jonathan D
Unregistered guest
Posted on
What are your exact color settings? trying to get mine right!!
I change them all the time as this monitor does not like a standard TV signal at all, and there is a green shift present in most dark scenes that I'm constantly trying to fight. Right now it is set to brightness 45, contrast 65, saturation 50, hue +4, sharpness 6, backlight 60, color temp 1. This is fine for most well-lit scenes.
Give this screen a good quality 480p or better signal from a DVD and it is great, or better yet a genuine HD signal from cable or satallite and it is superb. It's just having trouble with the SD signals.