JVC Procision LT-47X899 LCD HDTV Review - Controls & Menus

The JVC LT-47X899's menu system is rather complicated, with a lot of sub menus and so many controls you probably won't know what to do with them all. Control freaks will love it, most users will probably take one glance and not mess around with them again.

Ease of Use (5.5)
The LT47X899 has a rather complicated set of menus, as it offers a very wide selection of controls. You access the on-screen menu by pressing the menu button to the left of the directional pad in the center of the remote, and the directional keys and OK button are used to navigate and select the controls. The back button takes you back to the previous screen, and you can exist right out of the menu by pressing the menu button again. The menus are then broken up into 9 screens: initial setup, V-chip, closed caption, On/Off timer, picture adjust, sound adjust, features, key items and photo options.  Many of these have separate sub-menus and sub-screens. The overall effect of this is that it can be difficult to find the menu choice you need, especially as some of the least commonly used items (such as the closed caption controls) are amongst the first to be shown in the menu. Other, more commonly used ones (such as the bass and treble controls for the speakers) require more button presses to reach. This means that the LT-47X899 is somewhat frustrating to configure and use; it involves a lot of button pressing, scrolling and moving around overly complex menus. 

Picture Controls (7.5)
This is going to be a long section, so feel free to pause here and grab a cup of coffee or something. You're back? Good. To say that the LT-47X899 has a lot of controls to alter the color is putting it mildly; there are a huge selection of color related controls on this display. You start on the picture adjust menu, which gives you the first major option to consider; the video status mode.

The 4 preset options (standard, dynamic, theater and game) control all of the other settings, so they are a good way to quickly change all of the settings at once. Two memory modes (called memory 1 and memory 2) allow you to save custom settings. You can also turn the natural cinema mode on or off (or leave it on auto mode), which tries to apply a telecine correction for material shot at 24 frames per second.

The other options on the picture adjust menu are as follows:

Audio Controls (5.0)
The LT-47X899 has somewhat fewer audio than video controls, but there are still more than usual. The sound adjust menu uses a system called Maxx audio, which has four user-adjustable profiles; low, medium, high  and off, which disables the internal speakers. For each profile, the settings for bass, treble, stereo and balance can be altered on a scale of 1 to 10. There is also a setting for the turn on volume (the volume of display when it is switched on) and a volume limit setting, which sets the maximum selectable volume. This is useful if your kids keep cranking up the volume in Rock Band and you're sick of it. The MaxxVolume setting alters the volume as it is played back so you hear the quiet bits but don't wake up the sensitive neighbors with the noisy bits. You can also set the optical output format to PCM or Dolby Digital.

Although these controls cover the basics, there is no way to really tweak the sound; the LT-47X899 is lacking the equalizer controls that other displays have. It is also lacking the pseudo-surround sound features that other displays have, but given the lousy job these usually do compared to a proper surround sound system, that's no great loss.

Other Controls (6.0)
There are plenty of other menus on the LT-47X899. Let's look at them in turn.

The Initial setup menu is the first one you see when you turn the display on. From here you can set up the Tv tuner and the channels that you receive if you connect the display directly to a signal source (over the air digital TV and analog cable are supported). The LT-47X899 can automatically scan for channels and add them to the lineup. From this menu, you can also set the clock (or set it to grab the time from the TV signal).

For those of you who like to put limits on what the family can (and can't see), the V-chip menu sets the content restrictions. These can be based on TV and movie ratings in both the US and Canadian format. You can also set the display to allow or block unrated material.

The closed caption menu provides a lot of control over closed captions, including turning them on or off and setting the font and size used. The LT-47X899 also supports the more advanced captions that can be included with digital signals, which can include closed captions in different languages.  

The on/off timer basically turns your display into an an alarm clock; here, you can set the display to turn on at a particular time, then off at another time. You can also set the volume and the channel that it goes to. This could also be useful if your dog has a fondness for General Hospital and you have to work, but there is only one timer, so it won't help if they also want to catch All My Children; you'll need a Tivo for that.

The features menu is a kind of catch-all for stuff that doesn't fit in any where else, such as switching the fifth video input between HDMI, the VGA and the component input, setting the TV to skip showing the JVC logo on startup and changing the position of the screen. One important feature that is covered here is the aspect ratio; this menu option provides you the same choices that you get from pressing the aspect button on the remote.

The penultimate menu is the key items menu, which allows you to set things like the favorite TV channels that are listed when you press the favorite button on the remote and the clock display. It also allows you to set the language for those TV shows ht athave a second audio channel.

The LT-47X899 has a USB port on the back that can be used to connect a digital cameras. These features are controlled through the photo viewer menu. This basically turns your expensive display into a glorified photo frame, allowing you to view, zoom in and scroll around photos on any device that can act as a USB storage device. But you can't do anything else with them; there are no slide show features, no way to add background music and no other controls. 

Manual (7.0)
The JVC's manual is not as gigantic as some others we've seen, but it does a good job of providing sometimes complex information in an  accessible manner. In particular we like that there's a table of contents right inside the first page, although we also wish that there was an index in the back as well. Every page in the manual has large text at the top indicating what that page is talking about, which is very helpful when you're flipping through trying to find what you want. We did feel that the photos of menus were a bit on the small side, it was difficult to make things out sometimes. We did like the dedicated trouble-shooting section in the back, however.