QUICK PICK REVIEW: MAY 14, 2008
Westinghouse Digital TX-42F430S LCD HDTV
The “W-D” has a new 42-inch HD set, and it performs very well indeed.
Westinghouse Digital has made rapid strides in product quality ever since they first appeared on the scene a few years back. Lately, they’ve been offering some really good deals on LCD TVs in all sizes and are also starting to figure out the “image” thing — witness their Chelsea loft exhibition last year and their 2008 Penthouse show scheduled for early June.
Although the company is not currently in the top five of LCD brands for North America, they’re still a strong contender across all sizes and prices. So I thought it an opportune time to look at one of their newer sets, the TX-42F430S (SRP $1,599).
This 1080p HDTV sits at the upper end of what I call the “sweet spot” for LCD TVs, a range that goes down to 26 inches and encompasses the majority of TV sales these days. 42 inches is a good size for many living and family rooms, given the space available and typical viewing distances.
Figure 1. Westinghouse’s TX-42F430S has a nice matte onyx finish.
OUT OF THE BOX
The WD style has pretty much been established. It’s an all-black finish, with the bezel and base in matte (onyx) black, not the glossy piano black finish favored by Samsung and others. The WD logo sits centered just below the screen, and a tiny blue indicator light below that tells you when the TV is powered up. It’s subtlety, all the way.
As usual, there are plenty of inputs available. You’ll find four HDMI 1.3 inputs, so there’s no need for one of those ubiquitous 4x1 HDMI switchers everyone seems to be selling these days. Digital audio from HDMI inputs, as well as any received digital signal, passes through to an optical SPDIF connection for your home theater.
There is also a pair of component video inputs, one composite input, and one S-video input. Got a PC? You can hook that up to the 15-pin VGA connector with separate mini (1/8”) stereo audio input, or you can drive some computer signals through the HDMI ports (VGA, SVGA, XGA, WXGA, and 1080p).
All analog audio inputs loop-through to a pair of RCA jacks on the rear, but you’ll probably be content using the built-in 15-watt stereo speakers, which sound better than you’d think.
There is one RF input that can be configured to receiver either terrestrial analog and digital TV broadcasts (NTSC and ATSC), or to receive analog and digital cable (QAM) channels that aren’t scrambled. The tuner scans both types pretty quickly, and when you change digital channels you see not only the virtual channel information, but also the physical channel in parentheses. That’s handy if you happen to be watching “in the clear” digital cable programs,
REMOTE AND MENUS
The supplied remote is in the usual WD style, with lots of big buttons. It provides direct access to groups of inputs (HDMI, PC, individual component inputs, etc). Oddly enough, there’s a button marker “DVI” although there isn’t a DVI input to be found on the rear jack panel. You can also save three favorite channels and jump quickly to sleep mode, toggle backlight brightness down in steps of 10, and activate the picture-in-picture function.
The remote I had was a bit too sensitive to keypad pushes — sometimes it would jump in and out of a menu selection with one push! There are four preset picture modes — User, Enhanced, Sports, Game, and Movie — and one User mode. You’ll be able to set just about every parameter you want on the TX-42F430S by scrolling down to Calibration mode.
In this menu, you’ll find settings to activate or shut down Deinterlacing, turn the 3D comb filter on or off, tweak skin tones (the infamous “red push”), choose between three color temperature settings, turn dynamic contrast on or off, and adjust black and white levels (not to be confused with brightness and contrast).
The color temperature menu also lets you set red, green, and blue drive for each of the color temperature settings, the first time I’ve seen that level of control on anyone’s LCD HDTV. (Most sets only let you set RGB levels for one color temperature preset.) Backlight intensity is also adjustable from this menu.
Keeping it simple, there are three aspect ratios to choose from — Fill, Standard, and Overscan. Fill presents the source image at the correct aspect ratio, so 4:3 programs won’t fill the screen. Fill stretches them out to the edge in a non-linear fashion (HD programs are not affected), while overscan crops in on letterboxed programs.
WD’s AutoSource circuit is constantly looking for active inputs, a nice thing when you can’t remember what inputs you’ve actually hooked up. The only problem with this circuit, which I eventually turned off, was when I was watching Blu-ray content from a Samsung BD-P1200. The TV would occasionally lose sync and go to another HDMI input, then display “No Signal Detected.” A bit annoying to say the least!
Figure 2. Gamma performance is consistent with all picture presets except Enhanced.
Figure 3. The TX-42F403S tracks a given color temperature better than some Tier 1 LCD brands.
ON THE TEST BENCH
After calibration for best grayscale images, I measured image brightness at 178 nits — a bit higher than I like to see for viewing in darkened rooms. However, that can easily be dialed back using the adjustable backlight setting. You can ramp it as high as 530 nits in Enhanced mode, which makes for a glaringly bright picture. In other modes, brightness ranged from 302 to 490 nits, so the TX-42F430S has lots of horsepower.
Contrast numbers were excellent, to my surprised, measuring 622:1 peak and 523:1 ANSI (average). The reason? Decent black levels that measured below .3 nits in User and Movie modes. Gamma performance was also impressive, as I only saw some evidence of white crush in Enhanced mode (Figure 2). Movie, Sports, and User modes all tracked cleanly.
The TX-42F430S tracks a clean grayscale (Figure 3) even with factory settings, varying a total of 483 degrees after calibration as it swings through the D6500 target in middle gray tones. Most LCD TVs don’t do much better than that, and many have much wider swings in color temperature.
Figure 4 shows the plotted color gamut, and while it closely matches the desired blue coordinate, there’s not enough red and yellow in the mix to cover 100% of the BT.709 HDTV color space. That should be easy to fix in the backlight, as the amounts needed to shift towards yellow and away from cyan are almost the same for each of the five remaining colors.
Figure 4. A little too much cyan and too little yellow in the green channel resulted in this color gamut — just shy of covering the BT709 color space.
VIDEO QUALITY
I ran the TX-42F430S through a battery of tests using the Realta HQV red and blue laser DVDs, and was pleasantly surprised. The “jaggies” tests and waving flag sequence showed that the TV’s deinterlacing is decent, with minimal aliasing — not as good as a Reon or Realta processor, but better than the usual garden-variety TV.
In 1080p mode, the diagonal filtering in the “Jaggies” test was also better than expected. In the video resolution loss test, I did see aliasing on the rotating bars with some filling in of detail in the 1920 pixel blocks. The film resolution loss test showed that full 1080i processing was in use, weaving both fields with a little jitter. 3:2 cadence detection from SD and HD signals is a bit slow the first time around, taking about half a second.
For dynamic range and color saturation, I chose King Kong on HD DVD. The chase sequence with the dinosaurs has hot, bleached-out whites that still show up OK if the display isn’t clipping, and they were clean on the TX-42F430S. Flesh tones and pastel color are also tough on LCDs, but they displayed beautifully — in particular, the late afternoon scenes aboard the steam freighter as they approach Skull Island.
For my second test, I spun up Batman Begins, still one of the best HD DVDs for testing shadow detail and black levels. Once again, flesh tones and subtle color shades showed up nicely, free from any mottling or false contours that are sometimes seen on LCD TVs. The black levels, while decent, wiped out some shadow details during the Batmobile chase, but color shading stayed consistent throughout.
CONCLUSIONS
The TX-42F430S really surprised me. I went into my review expecting “just another 42-inch LCD” and came out of it quite impressed with the high level of performance in this $1,600 HDTV. Black levels are close to what the best plasmas achieved just five years ago, and the consistent gamma performance - even in high-brightness picture modes — was unexpected. Some minor color correction to the backlight, tighter grayscale tracking, and improved diagonal filtering would make this an outstanding value.
