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Vizio SV471XVT

24.10.2009
No doubt about it: An estimated street price of $1219 (as of 9/22/2009) sounds good for a 47-inch, 240Hz LCD HDTV--especially one with multimedia capabilities and a terrific remote. But the Vizio SV471XVT is no bargain when it comes to image quality.

Our test jury was not particularly impressed with the SV471XVT's picture clarity: The TV struggled with moving objects on screen, and occasionally had trouble with still objects, too--it displayed plenty of digital artifacts and pixelation in the PC World Labs' image quality tests. Halos of garbled pixels surrounded running players in a 720p baseball clip. Artifacts around small objects appeared in a 720p clip from Wheel of Fortune. Two of the three 1080i clips also had artifacts, and a scene from the Phantom of the Opera DVD had a halo even around someone walking slowly (artifacting is usually more of a problem with fast-motion sequences).

The SV471XVT did better with Blu-ray discs screening at its native 1080p resolution, but even here I saw moiré patterns in images of the Hong Kong skyline--shot in the large IMAX film format--in Chapter 9 of the Blu-ray version of The Dark Knight. At least one other judge noticed moiré patterns in the weave of Morgan Freeman's jacket (in a scene that wasn't shot in IMAX).

Shouldn't the 240Hz refresh rate fix this sort of problem? Not necessarily. In fact, the 240Hz Smooth Motion frame interpolation (which adds nine extra frames between the real ones) fixes some problems but can cause others.

After our jury tests, I ran Chapter 9 of The Dark Knight a few more times, trying the Smooth Motion interpolation option at different settings. I discovered that the Smooth Motion interpolation was the cause of the moiré pattern on the building; the building was rock solid when I turned Smooth Motion off. On the other hand, a rooftop tracking shot that looked fine with Smooth Motion switched on jittered a bit when it was off. The SV471XVT did quite well in the panning tests created by the Lab, which measure how smoothly a TV can handle panning and fast motion.

The SV471XVT also had some problems reproducing accurate color and brightness. Several judges noted that some scenes looked too dark; and others, too reddish or orange. Some faces in another Phantom of the Opera DVD scene looked blotchy and artificial, like a hybrid between a photograph and an oil painting, indicating that the SV471XVT had difficulties upscaling 480p DVD video to 1080 high-definition resolution.