Toshiba 57H82 57 in. TV
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- Aspect Ratio: 16:9 4:3 Enhanced 14:9
- Weight: 230 lb.
- Screen Size: 57 inch
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Great for home theater, but not casual TV viewing.
Pros
Superb image quality. Good calibration tools.
Cons
Big, heavy. Useless with high ambient light. Can be burnt in if not careful.
Recommended it?
Yes
The Bottom Line:
This is almost as good as rear projection systems gets.
Over winter break, I went back to visit my parents, who just bought a new house with a much larger family room. The old Toshiba 40" Theater-Wide I gave him four years ago is now simply too small. So we decided to get a new TV.
I recommended that he get a Samsung DLP TV instead. DLPs get perfect geometry out of the box and do not suffer from burn-ins. But my father insisted that the DLPs are too expensive, and for far less than a 40" DLP, he can get a 57" Toshiba rear projection system.
We did end up getting the Toshiba 57H82--or else you wouldn't be reading this review. Why? Well, a bit of history is in order first. The 57H82 is actually the third Toshiba TheaterWide I've had to deal with.
The first Toshiba wide-screen I owned was the Toshiba TW40F80. It was Toshiba's first TheaterWide introduced in this country. Back in 1998, it cost over $3000, and was a interlaced system. I had bought it with one of the first DVD players out--the Toshiba SD-3006. Wide screen TVs are great for viewing DVDs that are anamorphically encoded ("wide-screen enhanced"). This means that a wide-screen movie's 16x9 frame is squeezed into a 4x3 frame, and needs to be stretched out horizontally on a TV to be viewed properly. If you are watching the DVD on a normal TV, then every 4th horizontal line is thrown away by the DVD player to produce a 16x9 image that is "letter-boxed" on a conventional 4x3 TV. The TW40F80 was great for its time, but required a lot of tweaking--the geometry was horrible out of the box. I bought a service manual, and used to internal grid based convergence/geometry system to fix the geometry. Well, you could never totally fix the geometry, but it was pretty damned good. In addition, you had to modify the geometry for every single mode of the TV, including full screen, wide-screen anamorphic, wide-screen zoom (for those non-anamorphic wide-screen movies) et al. As you can well imagine, calibrating all the modes are a pain in the a-s-s, you even then the geometry was hardly perfect. But it was a lot better than any other TV of its day. Since the TW40F80 also included component video input, it was great for DVDs.
I gave this TV, along with my entire home theater system, to my parents when I moved to Boston.
Fast forward to 2000, Toshiba released its high definition wide-screens with monikers like TW40H80. They supported only the 1080 interlaced mode for HDTV.
Later, Toshiba released the 42H81. Since I had moved into a much larger apartment in Boston, I bought one for $1600. The H81 series had a major difference. The TV now has only two display modes--1080 interlaced and 540 progressive. Well, NTSC video isn't 540 progressive, so the TV upconverts the signal to 540 progressive. I was slightly concerned with this initially, but I didn't notice any artifacts. Also, all modes such as full screen, anamorphic, wide-screen zoom et al are all converted digitally. The one advantage is that there's only one mode for you to adjust via the service menu. This TV is wonderful, but the low intensity grey-scales are way too green. I had the TV calibrated by an ISF calibrator and had lens stripping done--$600 total. But the image is now superb. Also, the geometry was pretty damned good out of the box, and nearly perfect after a bit of tweaking.
So, back to the 57H82. As good as the Toshiba projection TVs are, there are issues that are common to all projection TVs.
First, the TV is useless with high ambient light. If you crank up the brightness, as my dad often did with the TW40F80, you risk burn-in. Also, if you watch a lot of 4x3 materials, you tend to burn in the sides of the TV. That happened to the TW40F80. If you view materials with high brightness levels, you notice that the TW40F80's sides are slightly darker in color--burn-in.
A DLP doesn't have such problems. Its geometry is always perfect, and cannot suffer from burn-ins. Unfortunately, a 57" DLP would be around $5000 or so. Also, DLPs are for various reasons, not able to display black as well as a rear-projection unit.
So primarily due to price, a 57H82 was what we ended up with.
The H82 series now support 760 progressive in addition to 1080 interlaced for high definition modes. I understand that the 760 progressive simply gets converted into 1080 interlaced. Also, the scaling and upconversion algorithm is slightly improved on the H82 series.
The result? The picture was fabulous, and the geometry was good out of the box. A bit of tweaking in the service menu solved any geometry issue. I'm surprised at how good Toshiba TVs are out of the box these days. I was not able to calibrated the grey-scale myself. Basically, if you put this TV in the movie mode--i.e., with warm color temperature and almost all other settings left to default, you're going to get a wonderful picture. The DVDs looked great on this TV and the details really jump out at you.
If you can get a ISF certified technician for your area, wonderful. Otherwise, just buy a copy of Avia and do the calibrations recommended.
For all the TV service codes, check
http://www.keohi.com/keohihdtv/brandspecific/toshiba/servicemenu/servicemenu.html
I recommended that he get a Samsung DLP TV instead. DLPs get perfect geometry out of the box and do not suffer from burn-ins. But my father insisted that the DLPs are too expensive, and for far less than a 40" DLP, he can get a 57" Toshiba rear projection system.
We did end up getting the Toshiba 57H82--or else you wouldn't be reading this review. Why? Well, a bit of history is in order first. The 57H82 is actually the third Toshiba TheaterWide I've had to deal with.
The first Toshiba wide-screen I owned was the Toshiba TW40F80. It was Toshiba's first TheaterWide introduced in this country. Back in 1998, it cost over $3000, and was a interlaced system. I had bought it with one of the first DVD players out--the Toshiba SD-3006. Wide screen TVs are great for viewing DVDs that are anamorphically encoded ("wide-screen enhanced"). This means that a wide-screen movie's 16x9 frame is squeezed into a 4x3 frame, and needs to be stretched out horizontally on a TV to be viewed properly. If you are watching the DVD on a normal TV, then every 4th horizontal line is thrown away by the DVD player to produce a 16x9 image that is "letter-boxed" on a conventional 4x3 TV. The TW40F80 was great for its time, but required a lot of tweaking--the geometry was horrible out of the box. I bought a service manual, and used to internal grid based convergence/geometry system to fix the geometry. Well, you could never totally fix the geometry, but it was pretty damned good. In addition, you had to modify the geometry for every single mode of the TV, including full screen, wide-screen anamorphic, wide-screen zoom (for those non-anamorphic wide-screen movies) et al. As you can well imagine, calibrating all the modes are a pain in the a-s-s, you even then the geometry was hardly perfect. But it was a lot better than any other TV of its day. Since the TW40F80 also included component video input, it was great for DVDs.
I gave this TV, along with my entire home theater system, to my parents when I moved to Boston.
Fast forward to 2000, Toshiba released its high definition wide-screens with monikers like TW40H80. They supported only the 1080 interlaced mode for HDTV.
Later, Toshiba released the 42H81. Since I had moved into a much larger apartment in Boston, I bought one for $1600. The H81 series had a major difference. The TV now has only two display modes--1080 interlaced and 540 progressive. Well, NTSC video isn't 540 progressive, so the TV upconverts the signal to 540 progressive. I was slightly concerned with this initially, but I didn't notice any artifacts. Also, all modes such as full screen, anamorphic, wide-screen zoom et al are all converted digitally. The one advantage is that there's only one mode for you to adjust via the service menu. This TV is wonderful, but the low intensity grey-scales are way too green. I had the TV calibrated by an ISF calibrator and had lens stripping done--$600 total. But the image is now superb. Also, the geometry was pretty damned good out of the box, and nearly perfect after a bit of tweaking.
So, back to the 57H82. As good as the Toshiba projection TVs are, there are issues that are common to all projection TVs.
First, the TV is useless with high ambient light. If you crank up the brightness, as my dad often did with the TW40F80, you risk burn-in. Also, if you watch a lot of 4x3 materials, you tend to burn in the sides of the TV. That happened to the TW40F80. If you view materials with high brightness levels, you notice that the TW40F80's sides are slightly darker in color--burn-in.
A DLP doesn't have such problems. Its geometry is always perfect, and cannot suffer from burn-ins. Unfortunately, a 57" DLP would be around $5000 or so. Also, DLPs are for various reasons, not able to display black as well as a rear-projection unit.
So primarily due to price, a 57H82 was what we ended up with.
The H82 series now support 760 progressive in addition to 1080 interlaced for high definition modes. I understand that the 760 progressive simply gets converted into 1080 interlaced. Also, the scaling and upconversion algorithm is slightly improved on the H82 series.
The result? The picture was fabulous, and the geometry was good out of the box. A bit of tweaking in the service menu solved any geometry issue. I'm surprised at how good Toshiba TVs are out of the box these days. I was not able to calibrated the grey-scale myself. Basically, if you put this TV in the movie mode--i.e., with warm color temperature and almost all other settings left to default, you're going to get a wonderful picture. The DVDs looked great on this TV and the details really jump out at you.
If you can get a ISF certified technician for your area, wonderful. Otherwise, just buy a copy of Avia and do the calibrations recommended.
For all the TV service codes, check
http://www.keohi.com/keohihdtv/brandspecific/toshiba/servicemenu/servicemenu.html
