Mitsubishi was kind enough to lend me one of its newest LCD-TVs over the last month so I could take it for a test drive in my home. I found the 46" LT-46144 TV to be a solid, but not stellar performer, and one that most consumers would be quite happy to own.

Chris Chinnock
Senior Analyst and Editor
for Insight Media

In my review, I did not perform quantitative measurements like luminance, contrast, color gamut or gray scale accuracy. Instead, I tried to use the TV more like an ordinary consumer and provide more subjective feedback on image quality and features.

The LT-46114 is a good-looking set with a thin bezel and piano-black finish. It offers 1920×1080 resolution, 120Hz refresh rate, xvYCC color decoding support and a host of connector options. The 144 series is actually a mid-line product in Mitsubishi’s product line up. While the MSRP for this is $3,200, it is currently available at Amazon.com for $2,580. When I got it earlier this year, it was in major big box retailers for around $2,900.

Out of the box, this unit is easy to hook up offering three component and three HDMI connector options. Each input can be labeled too, which is handy as you scan the inputs for content. At 85 pounds however, this unit is just a little too big and heavy for one person to easily move around.

The first thing you notice about the set is that it is bright, has very good and uniform black levels and bright saturated colors. I personally like well-saturated colors and I like a higher color temperature setting, this gives the whites more pop. I know some of these setting may not accurately reproduce the BT-709 color space specified for HDTV and the grayscale is not accurate, etc., but if you like the image, it’s a good image.

One of the features I found particularly useful was the PerfectColor menu. Here, users can adjust the color saturation of the six primary colors individually. This proved to be quite adequate in creating colors that looked real and natural to my eye, and to the other viewers in my household.

There were some problems with the set. Most noticeable was the motion blur. Note that this is a 120Hz update TV, but I found no difference in the motion blur compared to my Sony LCD TV with 60Hz updates. In fact, my wife found the effect worse than the Sony set making it nearly unwatchable on some content.

We watched the World Series on both sets simultaneously. The umpires’ uniform was slightly blacker on the Mitsubishi set than on the Sony, but details in the darker grey levels seemed about the same. The white levels looked about the same, too, once the color temperature on the Mitsubishi set was switched to high. The ability to see details in the whiter end of the grey scale was good, with both sets being quite similar.

The Sony set exceeded the performance of the Mitsubishi in noise performance, as shown in several scenes in the World Series. In particular, close ups of the batter revealed a brick wall next to a green screen that was used to insert ads into the video stream. On the Mitsubishi set, the mosquito noise in these two features was particularly bad. This became worse with slow motion shots. It also produced a dithering effect in long shots of the outfield. These problems were greatly reduced in the Sony set. Unfortunately, they were too noticeable and objectionable in the Mitsubishi set.

I did decide to run some test patterns on the two sets to see if this showed the visual differences. I used the Silicon Optics HQV test DVD (http://www.hqv.com/benchmark.cfm) for this.

In the color bar test, both sets showed stable electronics with smooth gray scales and discernable difference in levels at the black and white ends of the range, although the Sony was poorer in the gray scale linearity and clipping to the unaided eye.

There are three tests for jaggie reduction. The Mitsubishi set performed better than the Sony set here providing average to above-average results.

The sharpness test looks at edge definition in the test image. Both were just average performers with the Mitsubishi set a bit softer and showing some dither-like noise in grass details.

The noise tests were not good for the Mitsubishi set, as expected. Mosquito noise was evident in many images and others showed what looked like chroma flickering. The Sony set was much better here, showing relatively few problems, none of them serious.

In the film detail test, the Mitsubishi set exhibited noticeable moiré pattern noise in the grandstand image of this video sequence, whereas the Sony set showed very little.

The cadence tests proved tough for both sets although 3:2 sequences were OK. The mixed film/video tests included horizontal and vertical scrolling of text. Both sets did well in the horizontal scrolling of text, but in vertical scrolling, the Mitsubishi did poorly and the Sony set did well. Interestingly, as a menu option, Mitsubishi shows a horizontal scrolling text as a demonstration of its 120Hz technology, but clearly, Sony’s 60Hz did just as well.

So what’s the verdict? I liked the higher brightness, better black levels (and uniform black levels) and color tuning of the Mitsubishi set over my Sony set. But in terms of video performance, especially noise, I prefer the Sony. Which is better? That depends on your personal preferences. How’s that for a non-political answer?