My Black Pearl Adventure (Sony VW60)

[bhampton]

Quote "You can always tell you this. Even in a theater, black level is never great. It's always dark gray. I never saw a theater with Kuro Plasma Deep Black."

To comment further on this (it's a big issue actually)... the VW60 does have very good blacks. (At least ... after about 40 hours or so on the bulb.)

I have a custom built room with no windows and all dark paint and carpet and so on. I don't even think a Plasma would be able to go fully black in my theater. My CRT FP had blacks so black I could not see my hand pass in front of my face (Really... I tried it.) However,.. You would always lose some shadow detail with it set like that.

The CRT would win for absolute fade to black but when it comes to a scene with mixed light levels like a person standing in a well lit room with a black tux on ... the VW60 wins. It preserves more close to black in a scene of mixed light level.

Apart from Black... Focus and Uniformity are perfect on the VW60. On my old CRT FP there were 4 optical focus adjustments for each of the 3 tubes... Making 12 optical focus adjustment and then plenty of Electro-Magnetic Focus adjustments followed that. Even if you were careful,.. you had more chance of winning the lottery than getting it all setup correctly. And...Still... Color uniformity and focus varied as you moved about the screen.

I don't think I would consider Plasma or anything with a possibility of Burn in now. I love my PS3 and have several games and over 100 demos on the hard drive. I can play anything and never think about burning in the health gauge. Also station identification logos of HDTV stations similarly no longer pose a risk.... I love that.

-Brian