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The JVC LT-32P679 did not impress us in our testing. We found that it performed adequately in some areas and we were actually impressed by the solid black level and excellent tunnel contrast and white falloff performance. It flat out flunked our greyscale gamma test, however, and we found the viewing angle limited and motion was not handled particularly well.
Calibration
When an HDTV comes out of the box it is rarely ready for you to get the best picture. As such we take the time to calibrate the HDTVs we test to ensure that we are testing the best performance it can provide. You can pay a professional to come to your home and calibrate your HDTV for you, or you can use the settings we found below. In order to obtain these settings we use DisplayMate, the same professional sofware that many television manufacturers use.
| Setting |
Default
|
Calibrated
|
Video Status
|
Theater |
Theater |
| Picture |
45 |
36 |
| Bright |
54 |
49 |
Backlight
|
22 |
100 |
Smart Picture
|
On |
Off |
Digital VNR
|
Low |
Off |
We do need to talk about a major issue we ran into while calibrating the JVC LT-32P679. On most HDTVs the Picture control allows you to adjust the whites and the Brightness control allows you to adjust the blacks. On the JVC LT-32P679, however, we found that there was an interplay between these two controls, which seemed to indicate some active processing on the part of the HDTV. We had turned off all of the special features so those were not to blame, so this seemd to be some kind of processing that could not be turned off. We even spoke with JVC about the matter, but they could not shed any light on the matter.
The result is that we were not able to calibrate for our ideal white and black levels. Instead we had to choose compromise levels, which allowed us to see whites at a lower level than we would have liked and blacks at a higher level than we would have liked. This did have an impact on some of our results, when we believe that this happens we will point it out.
Video Modes
The JVC LT-32P679 has four different video modes that are called Video Status under the Picture menu. Below is a summary of what each mode does.
| Mode |
What it Does |
| Standard |
Brightness turned way up, Detail turned up, Backlight turned up to maximum, all special features turned off.
|
| Dynamic |
Color turned way up, brightness turned up slightly, detail turned up, backlight at maximum, color temperature to cool, all special features off.
|
| Game |
Color turned way up, detail turned up slightly, backlight at about midpoint, Color Managment turned on, Smart Picture turned on, Digital VNR to Low, MPEG NR turned on.
|
| Theater |
Backlight turned down significantly, Smart Picture On, Digital VNR to Low, MPEG NR on.
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 Dot Pattern
What can we say, we're geeks, so we used a 20x microscope to take a close look at the actual pixels of the JVC LT-32P679. To the right you can see a photo of what the pixels look like when displaying white. As you can see it is made up of red, blue and green LEDs, each set of three makes up one pixel on the display. Different colors are created by adjusting the amount of each color produced. We didn't notice any problems with the pixels on the JVC LT-32P679.
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