Vidikron VL-37

VIDIKRON VL-37 LCD TV REVIEW - Best-of-Class LCD Picture

October 2006 By —Grant Clauser

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The market for LCD TVs is extremely hot right now. There are at least 20 brands of LCD TVs available, from both well-known household names like Sony, Sharp and Panasonic, to many more barely heard of brands. Prices for LCD TVs are all over the map, from premium-priced units to Costco bargain. Vidikron is among the former. Vidikron products, produced by Runco, one of the top brands in high-end home theater displays, are elite products available only from independent home theater specialists, not the major electronics stores or warehouse markets.

This 37-inch LCD TV is currently Vidikron’s largest LCD model. Other makers offer much larger LCD TVs, but Vidikron is a stickler for picture quality, believing its customers don’t want to sacrifice a perfect picture just to get a bigger one. For larger sized screens, the company offers plasma TVs, which its engineers believe offer better performance than LCDs at large sizes.

Being designed for custom installation, you’ll find a lot of professional-level conveniences built-in that you won’t find on off-the-shelf TVs from Best Buy or Circuit City. First, being video purists, feature ISF (Imaging Science Foundation) modes allow your installer to easily do a grayscale calibration on the display, which will ensure the best picture. It offers detail picture controls, as well as day and night ISF settings to get the picture right for viewing in light and dark situations. It also has an RS-232 input to make it compatible with the most advanced home control systems from companies like AMX and Crestron. In addition, it features discreet input controls, separate input memories, smart aspect ratio controls and separate on and off controls, all to make it very customizable.

This particular model is based on a 1366 x 768 resolution panel with a 1000:1 contrast ratio. If that contrast ratio sounds a little less aggressive than other makers’ inflated numbers, that’s because Vidikron is actually a bit conservative in how it measures and reports these numbers. In actual practice, the contrast is best of its class.

The TV has two component inputs and one RGB input (for use as a PC monitor) but only one DVI and no HDMI inputs. While the DVI is HDCP-compliant (which means it meets the copy protection requirements) and will work with any HDMI product with an adaptor, I do believe more than one digital input would be nice—one for an HDTV set-top-box and one for a high definition disc player (HD DVD or Blu-Ray)—especially since the VL-37 doesn’t have any built-in TV tuner.

If this TV somehow makes it into your living room without an installer tweeking the picture for you, don’t worry. The standard picture controls are easy to handle. I did a basic calibration using a DataColor SpyderTV before I did any critical evaluation of the picture, but even out of the box with all the settings at their default, the TV looked good. After I made some adjustments, I started out with standard DVD through a Yamaha DVD player that upconverts the picture to 720p via a DVI cable. That picture was excellent. I then switched to HDTV content via Toshiba’s new HD DVD player. I watched the movie Serenity, sent from the player at 1080i, and scaled by the TV to the 768p native resolution. In most scenes, black levels and shadow detail looked great. In a few very dark scenes, some details appeared to be lost amid some mosquito video noise, but not really enough to be distracting. Colors were bold and edges were sharp. Especially noticeable was the amount of details in facial close-ups. The integrity of the images wasn’t affected by motion either. Vidikron doesn’t provide the pixel response time in the product specs, but it must be at least 6ms, because there was no motion blur in scenes when gunfire and space ships screamed across the screen. yy