TV Reviews

I am very very happy with my new TV....

Its a much nicer looking set in my mind than the Samsung. It costs much less as well. The picture quality from the HI-def channels is Eye popping! Your tongue will hit the floor! The quality of DVD (especially if used in the DVI input) is breath taking! Its ease of use is a big plus as well. Especially impressive is the picture-in-picture (PIP) function.

The speaker base (referring to the base of TV from ground to where the screen starts) is a bit stubby so I had to buy a stand for it to bring it up to Eye level in my living room. But I can use the stand to house components that I use with it.

This GE tv is an odd size because it is a 31'. Usually this size tv is 32' but who cares about an inch because it is $X cheaper than most of the 32' tvs. We bought this tv because it was free as long as we sign up for 3 years with MSN internet, which was well worth it. This tv is awesome good size, good color, nothing has broken on it. The picture is as clear as possible. Plus this tv also came with tv guide plus. Tv guide plus is a free guide that is put on your tv to flip channels with (like on digital cable and satellite). Recommendation for this tv, it is awesome.

I wanted a larger screen TV, everyone in my family wears glasses, and watching this television, was like setting in our local movie multiplex. The quality and sound were excellent. It is user friendly.

I recently bought this card and I absolutely love it. All my games run so much smoother and look gorgeous. I upgraded from a Radeon 7000 64Mb and I will never again buy anything except NVidia products. I play a lot of the WWII games like Battlefield 1942, Medal of Honor, and a few others and the games now run at the highest settings without any choppiness. The only thing that was wrong was the card software didn't work because of an outdated driver.After downloading the newer driver along with a new bios everything worked great. Don't hesitate. If you are a gamer and are looking for a new card, this is it.

First I would like to say lacking a true Mpeg-2 decoder for DVD play is surely missed. However After owning a Voodoo 2. This is definitely a big improvement in speed and vivid color(graphics). I installed the drivers, and we I was on my way to video game heaven. It's not perfect by any means, but it runs well with every game I own. Playing Deus Ex with screen full of enemies surely brings slow frame rates. I feel thats to be expected. All in all it I'm totally impressed,

This is a great TV. The picture clarity is really good and the numerous features of this TV makes it a real good bargain at this price. The surround sound gives an extra edge to the experience of watching a movie or any other program. On the whole a great product and a decent price.

This is my second Hitachi purchase, my first was the 61" projection tv. With all the fine qualities of that model behind me you can imagine how criticle I was when shoping for a smaller size tv, this size reduction was a result of moving to a much smaller house. This 36"tv has a very nice picture, no noticable eye strain after two months. The colors are of a high quality and if one wish's they may make every change imaginable with the easy to use remote. The 2 tuner PIP has always been dear to me allowing for two (sports) games to be viewed at the same time, and with a very nice picture being displayed by both tuners. I am fully saticfide with my purchase and you can just imagine how happy I was to learn of my very good deal. If there was one thing this company could do to please me more, I would ask that they put the two level muting system in that is on the larger tv's, this was very handy when the phone rang allowing for the game to go on with just the right volume. M A Moline PS. allthought it may seem so, I really don't work for Hitachi.

After exhaustive research to find the perfect fit for our needs and budget, we decided on the Hitachi 50gx49b. It has lived up to every expectation....picture clarity...ease of use...sound reproduction...etc.... the highest possible recommendation for a job well done Hitachi....Happy New Year!

After a year of shopping, my wife & I decided to experience this puppy. Granted that all plasma t.v.s look great, this one on the show floor looked a tad better, so we sprang for the extra bucks after first getting a sale price, then a 10% discount ontop of an additional 10% discount. It was merely a horribly expensive unit instead of obscenely expensive that way.

At home, we had an installer scheduled to come out and mount it on the wall, but we couldn't wait and went ahead and did the installation on the pedastle, which is a two person job and takes about 3 hours, with the constant fear of dropping something on the screen. We didn't break anything, but I don't recommend self installation unless you have nerves of steel.

After haggling with the cable company, we added HDTV service and after about 5 days managed to review the unit in the following modes:

1. analog cable t.v.
The image quality is good, probably superior to regular NTSC quality. Key advantage is you can toggle the 5 or so image scale modes to make it fit just right. There is a progressive distortion mode that while stretching the image to fit the 16:9 from the NTSC standard, does it so well that there is no obvious distortion except for the rare case where you see what should be a circle in one of the corners. The image size is such that you really can't take in the whole screen at once so it's a rarely if ever noticed distortion and visually quite good considering the low quality of analog broadcast
2. digital cable t.v.
Probably not a great idea. You have two modes on the Hitachi and 3 modes on the cable box to scale the image, and they seem to fight eachother resulting in a less than stellar picture. I actually prefer analog for quality when all settings are done. I would suspect the same issues with Satellite, but I'm not ready to add that to my gadget list to be sure.
Special note for folks who have "movie on demand" fantasies. NONE of the "movies on demand" are HDTV format. Maybe next year. I'm disappointed, but with my cable company, not Hitachi.
3. digital 1080i cable t.v.
Granted, this device is not a 1080i display, it's 1,280 by 780, but however it down-converts the signal, it's an amazingly clear picture. The only concern you might have is looking at the imperfections on people's faces that are normally invisible. I mean, how many of you will find your attention distracted by looking at the details of the hairs growing from a mole on the interviewer's face. Sometimes, detail it too much of a good thing, but by all that's holy, it's remarkable detail and quality. My suspicion is that satellite folks will love this mode too. HOWEVER, there are very few HDTV channels right now, and I'd say, like all t.v. wasteland material, maybe 1 or 2 has something interesting.
4. svideo DVD
A high quality display that looks fine, but you'll discover that frame sizes vary depending upon DVD producer's whim and you may find yourself toggling among 6 different display modes trying to find one that won't burn-in and that looks good too. I don't have the HDTV composite version of a DVD player so I can't comment on that and I blew my toy budget for the next 3 years so it'll be a while before I know how wonderful that feature is.
5. RCA jack vhs video
This is the worst image quality mode, due to the source. however the analog variable image scaling works well, and the picture is better than when displayed on the baby 30 inch sony 3:4 that this replaced.
6. RGB output from a PC
Jury is out here. I've hooked 3 different PCs into this and know for sure that your milage will vary. Depending on which version of Windows you have, whose display driver you have, etc, etc, you will either get a stunning image of your desktop, or a stunning distorted image of your desktop. Be warned a 1280 X 780 display is obviously not the top display mode debugged by video card driver makers. It's not that you won't get it to work, but you may find that your actual display size is, well, funny. Hitachi has a nice "auto size" mode that at least gets the desktop to fill the screen, irrespective of what the video card driver wants to do. You can browse easily, clearly, and start shopping at once for a wireless keyboard and mouse. We did.
7. Universal remote vs. Universal remote
There were actually three settups done for us. The one my wife & I did, the one the official installer did, and the one the cable boy did. Each of us knows how a system should be wired, and how the universal remote should be programmed. At the end of the day, I had THREE universal remotes, sony, cable company, and hitachi. Each programmed by the mad mind of the perfect configurator. At the end of the day, the universal remote that works best is the Hitachi, which surprised me. The cable guy insisted that it would never work with the cable box. I discovered that it works better with the cable box than the universal remote that came with the cable box. That doesn't mean you will have ONE universal remote. Mixed vendors = mixed results. I can now get by with TWO universal remotes, provided I keep a third nearby. Driving 5 different vendor's devices with 2.5 remotes ain't bad.
8. Burn in
Hitachi says, never keep the side bars (normal HTDV display) on for more than 15% of the time, lest thou shalt melt the phosphor and destroy your display. I looked at the persistance image after turning the device off (in the dark), and my guess is that 15% is the maximum. I plan on keeping it down to as close to zero as possible. If you plan on using this with a PC, make sure your screen saver is really on, and really doing a dynamic or BLACK display unless you want to see START on the bottom of your display for eternity. (apologies to MAC users)