Hewlett-Packard LC3040N 30" Widescreen HD-Ready Flat-Panel LCD TV

Rating:
Summary: Nice Unit but Some Video-related Issues
Review: I've had this unit for about a week. I also own a 50" Pioneer plasma which I can compare the performance to.

Pluses: Nice styling, fit and finish. It looks ultra-modern. Tons of connectivty from the back including DVI (sorry, no HDMI). Speakers mate securely, and complement the unit. They look like they belong there. Speakers sound fantastic for such small attachments. For big movies you'll still need to channel the sound thru your home theater - but the included speakers don't suck. Images are bright - but somewhat grainy compared to plasma. If you are about 4 screen heights away from the screen the picture quality is close to plasma - but I could see differences. Also no dead pixels on this unit so far as I can tell.

Minuses: Unit has trouble syncing to 480i component video. I tried a Sony and a Denon DVD player and it lost sync on anamorphic widescreen material (2.35:1). The problem was horrible on the Sony - but not as bad using the Denon player. I had to switch to 480p to get the HP LCD to settle down in component mode. The remote control is nothing special. It is not backlit and is somewhat hard to use. Could not program it to understand basic functions of my Denon DVD player - although it is supposed function with other brands of electronics. Also, sometimes you have to press the remote twice to get it to register on the unit. But the two biggest drawbacks are: Only 3 aspect modes: 4:3, Panoramic (more commonly known as Wide mode for stretching 4:3 material to fit 16x9 aspect), Normal (which is commonly known as Full mode and used to show anamorphically encoded DVDs). There's no "through" mode or native pixel mode - as far as I can tell - although I have not used the DVI connection yet - but I plan to soon. The biggest drawback is that this set is not a true 16x9 aspect ratio. It's 1280x768 native resolution, and the pixels are square. This means the set is 15x9. The scaler built into the unit has trouble properly scaling for this aspect ratio. For instance, when showing a DVD in component mode - it scales 4:3 material to the exact aspect ratio defined by the 720x480 pixels on the DVD - without taking into account that the pixels are not encoded gemetrically as squares on a DVD. This means that (in component mode only) that the resulting image is slightly stretched horizontally. This is not a problem in S-video or composite mode where it scales the NTSC image correctly to 1024x768 (a 4:3 aspect). But for component video - this same image is scaled to 1152x480 or 1.5:1 aspect ratio - which is not the true aspect ratio on the DVD, because the DVD pixels are not square. Which means in component - the horizontal axis of the LCD image is stretched by 12.5 percent. So instead of getting 1.333:1 aspect (the normal NTSC aspect ratio), you are getting a 1.5:1 aspect ratio. Not a good thing. For normal mode (e.g., Full Mode anamorphic)- the image looks correct (no stretching) so I can only assume that some of the left and right portions of the image are cropped in order to fit 16x9 material into a 15x9 aspect ratio. On my Pioneer unit - which is also a native 1280x768 display - the pixels are rectangular (slightly longer than tall) - so 16x9 material fits perfectly on this display. Here, 1280 means 1366 virtual pixels - so 16x9 material is scaled to a virtual 1366x768 and aspect is preserved. But because the HP LCD used square pixels - and the scaler blindly maps 720x480 to 1152x768 in component mode, the image is compromised. And you can tell. The HP scaler should scale 720x480 component to 1024x768 - but it doesn't.

So bottom line - this is a nice unit - but there are these issues for anyone who cares to know about them. As a new TV brand, HP has a few lessons to learn on doing HDTV (and regular TV for that matter) properly - so that aspect ratios for 4:3 material are properly rendered in component video. And HP needs to figure out why the set has trouble syncing to 480i component video. Also, this set runs quite a bit warmer that my 50 inch plasma. Obviously, the designers were not too concerned with how much power they burned to achieve a fairly good image. If you want to buy HP, you may want to wait for the next generation of LCD sets - and perhaps some of these issues will be resolved by then.

Rating:
Summary: Component inputs don't work
Review: The TV generates a lot of heat, and after about 10-15 minutes of use with component video inputs, the colors wash out. This happened with 2 different HD cable boxes and 2 different DVD players. The display is not a problem for composite video (yellow RCA) input, but if you are looking for HD, don't get this!