 |
| The LC-46D64U had a moderately good angle of view; a small to medium sized family should be able to gather around and watch in comfort. Bigger families might want to consider a plasma TV instead, though, as these have a wider angle of view. |
 |
Viewing Angle (5.01) 
Not everyone gets to sit right in front of the TV; if you are a younger sibling in a large family, you might end up looking at the TV from quite a large angle. That's why we test the viewing angle of TVs, examining how the display behaves as the observer moves off-axis. The LC-46D64U had middling performance here; we measured the angle at which the contrast ratio dropped by 50 per cent at 21 degrees for a total viewing angle of 42 degrees. That's in the middle of the range that we've seen; the Sony Bravia 46W4100 was slightly smaller at 30 degrees for the total viewing angle, but the Panasonic Viera TH-46PZ80U blew everything out of the water with a total viewing angle of 156 degrees.
The contrast ratio measurement doesn't tell the entire story here; we also saw that colors tended to fade out at the middle angles, and then turn very dark at the more extreme angles.
Reflectance (6.5)
The LC-46D64U has an anti-reflective coating on the top layer of the screen, and this does a fairly decent job of making reflections less annoying. They are still visible, but they are fairly well diffused, so they don't interfere too much with the image on the screen.
Video Processing (2.5)
TV manufacturers try and tempt people in by offering features that they claim will enhance the image quality by processing the image in various ways. Let's look at each of these picture enhancement features in turn.
| Processing Type |
What They Claim |
What We Saw |
| Active Contrast |
"Adjusts black level and white level of images" |
Dynamically adjusts the contrast level of images, pushing some shadow details down to black and some highlights to white |
| I/P Setting |
"Image Compensation settings: Fast - optimized for action videos. Slow - optimized for video with fine detail" |
No noticeable difference in action videos or those with fine detail |
| Monochrome |
"for viewing a video in monochrome" |
Does what it says, turning your videos onto old-time black and white. |
| 3D-Y/C |
"provides high quality images with minimal dot crawl and cross color noise."
|
No noticeable difference in videos. |
As usual, most of these features are pretty much useless, unless you have a particular yearning for the days of black and white TV. If you don't skip these settings and spend some time properly calibrating your TV; it will provide more of a quality improvement than any of these features do.
|
