Mitsubishi WS-55857 55 in. TV

Like another reviewer, I looked at widescreen sets for over a year before I bought one. I replaced a direct view 27" set, so this was my first projection, first widescreen, and first high definition set.

It does take getting used to. The picture is huge, which is really nice and immersive. I can watch it from the kitchen 40' away, or get the cinema experience from my couch 10' away. It is important to control light in the room, however, and I find myself adjusting it frequently if I'm in the dark vs. during the day.

The factory defaults for the display are like many sets - totally out of whack. A couple hours of tuning with Video Essentials or Avia, with another tune up after a month, made the picture a whole lot better. I have not gotten a formal ISF calibration.

The 55857 has a plethora of inputs including high definition component, 2 component NTSC (RGB connectors for 480i or 480p) a 15 pin VGA connector, and a bunch of Svideo, composite, and cable connectors which I don't use. I have a dish 6000 receiver hooked up to the high definition connectors, and a Toshiba 3109 DVD player hooked up to one of the NTSC component inputs (both reviewed elsewhere), and love the picture.

The high definition pictures are absolutely superb. I get high definition HBO, with about 5 or 6 movies a day, and they blow you away. DVDs aren't that shabby either, and both formats certainly are preferred over going out to a movie house these days.

One gripe I have is that the VGA input only accepts 640x480p input, and won't do higher resolutions. I have not experimented with hooking a computer up to the HDTV connector to get 1920x1080i resolution.

The remote is so-so. I use it for a couple functions my universal remote doesn't do, but don't like it. It has backlighting, but not on any of the important buttons. It does have good coverage of other devices.

The consumer accessible controls are all fairly easy to use, but disappointing in how much control they give you over advanced picture tuning options. If you are really into fanatic level tweaking of your set, you may have a little frustration.

The NTSC picture is frame doubled to 480p so you get a very solid picture from DVD, cable, satellite, etc. without any flicker, and without noticable scan lines. This is important to me, as it was a real issue with older projection televisions. Optionally, a user can select to view the picture in 960i (can flicker a bit, but really smoothes out the lines). The internal line doubler is not the greatest money can buy, but it provides adequate performance. It supports 3:2 pulldown for viewing 24fps film, but this mode has to be manually selected.

Nevertheless, it offers a really excellent picture once tuned, and the quality is extremely good for the price. The only sets I saw which were better were the Pioneer Elite (very expensive). I also considered the Toshiba Theaterwide series sets as well, but eventually selected the Mitsubishi for picture and connection advantages.

I recommend reading discussion threads at hometheaterspot.com for advanced tweaking information and other material on the mitsubishi sets.

I do not use the sound or tuner capabilities of the set at all.