Vizio GV46LF

CNET editors' review

If you've roamed the cavernous halls of discount retailer Costco recently, you may have seen flat-panel HDTVs with the Vizio brand name and wondered whether their prices were too good to be true. Vizio televisions routinely cost a few hundred dollars less than the competition, and lately we've lauded their cost-to-performance ratios, although we have liked some better than others. Both of the inexpensive 42-inch Vizio LCDs we reviewed recently, for example (models L42 HDTV and GV42L HDTV), performed relatively well, and we called them great bargains as a result. The 46-inch model reviewed here, the GV46L HDTV, didn't perform as well as its smaller cousins though; we found its black-level performance and overall color accuracy disappointing given the brand's track record. We still can't argue with the GV46L's price, which is really low for a 46-inch LCD, but given a choice we'd take the company's 50-inch plasma instead.

Design of Vizio GV46LF

The 46-inch Vizio GV46L HDTV looks exactly like a bigger version of the 42-inch GV42L HDTV on the outside. Glossy black is the new black in TV country, and the Vizio follows suit nicely, framing its wide screen in a relatively thin, 1.5-inch-wide, glossy black border. The speakers and the stand below the screen are silver, and the Gallevia sub-brand is printed across the middle under the Vizio logo. The logo glows orange until the TV is turned on, after which it flashes white and quickly fades to a very dim white. We liked the dimness, especially considering that you can't turn off the illuminated logo completely.

One of the nice things about this Vizio is the fact that you can remove the speakers if you want to slim down the set's look and are planning to use an external audio system anyway. The GV46L HDTV measures 44.4 by 31 by 10.5 inches (WHD) with speakers and stand attached, and it weighs 82 pounds. Stripped of stand and speakers, it comes in at 44.4 by 26.5 by 4.8 inches, and 68 pounds. As do most other manufacturers, Vizio sells wall-mount kits if you want to go that route.

Given their similarities in outward appearance, we were surprised to find that the GV46L HDTV's menu is different from that of the GV42L. The larger set's menu system is still pretty basic-looking but covers everything you need in a logical fashion. Vizio includes the same many-buttoned remote, however, so all 51 of the keys are backlit. That makes finding a certain key in the dark less tiresome than it would be otherwise, but what we'd really like to see is better differentiation among the many buttons. We did appreciate the direct-access keys for different inputs, however, and the fact that the clicker can command three other pieces of gear.

Features of Vizio GV46LF

Like many LCD panels and most 50-inch plasmas, the Vizio GV46L HDTV has a native resolution of 1,366x768 pixels. That's not as many as you'll find on higher-end 1080p LCDs, but it's still enough to display every detail of incoming 720p HDTV programming. All sources, be they 1080i or 720p HDTV, DVD, standard-def TV, or computer, are scaled to fit the native resolution.

As it has with previous panels, Vizio endowed the GV46L HDTV with a generous selection of conveniences. They include picture-in-picture, which also offers a side-by-side option, as well as a freeze mode that's handy for catching quick information. Vizio's selection of aspect ratio controls is average: three for high-def sources and four for standard-def. And as its name indicates, the GV46L HDTV is in fact a full HDTV, meaning that it includes an ATSC tuner for grabbing over-the-air high-def and digital stations.

In terms of picture-affecting options, the GV46L HDTV starts with five different preset picture modes, called Vivid, Movie, Game, Sport and Custom. Of the five, the only one you can adjust is Custom, but happily, you can select different custom picture settings for each input (a.k.a. independent input memories). Our one complaint with the picture memory system is that the controls for sharpness and hue (tint) are not independent per input. This becomes an issue if you adjust, say, an HDMI input for high-quality HD sources, turning down the sharpness control to eliminate edge enhancement, because you'll have to sacrifice sharpness in lower-quality SD sources, which would ideally have a higher sharpness setting.

A variety of other picture controls are available, with the notable exception of color temperature presets. We did appreciate the ability to adjust red, green, and blue color temperature, although the results weren't as effective as we'd like (see Performance for details). There's a set of noise reduction controls, a flesh-tone control that's best left off since it just seemed to accentuate red too much; a dynamic contrast control that affects contrast on the fly, so we left it off; and a three-step backlight adjustment.

Control over the backlight is usually a welcome sign in LCD TVs, but on the GV46L HDTV, it behaved badly. When its backlight was set to either of the nondefault positions, namely Low and Medium, the TV produced a loud humming sound; lower-pitched in Low and slightly higher but still clearly audible in Medium. We ended up leaving it in the High position, which, while silent, did result in black levels that were slightly inferior to the other two settings. We stress the word slightly, however; reducing the backlight didn't improve the GV46L's black-level performance enough to be a big deal. When we asked Vizio about the issue they said that the noise we heard was normal--in other words, other GV46L HDTV models will exhibit the same behavior.

The Vizio GV46L HDTV boasts a commendable array of inputs for such a budget big-screen. There are two HDMI ports, a pair of component-video inputs, and a PC input that can handle sources up to the full native resolution of the TV (1,366x768). Both of the HDMI ports have audio inputs, a welcome sight for people connecting DVI equipment. Two A/V inputs with composite and S-Video, a single RF style antenna input, a headphone jack, and an analog audio output complete the connectivity suite. The only real missing link is a set of side-panel inputs for easy temporary connections.

Performance of Vizio GV46LF

As we mentioned, the Vizio GV46L HDTV's overall picture quality wasn't at the level of the company's 42-inch LCDs, delivering lighter blacks and less-accurate colors. Performance via the standard-def inputs was excellent, however, perhaps due to the GV46L HDTV's DCDi processing. Note that you won't get the benefit of this processing if your source, such as an HD cable or satellite box or a DVD player, performs the upconversion to high-def itself.

Our first step was to adjust the picture for optimal performance in our dark lab. The GV46L HDTV lacks specific presets for color temperature, but each of its five picture presets did deliver different color-temperature results. None of them was particularly accurate, but the Custom mode was least objectionable (we used it for the Before numbers in the Geek box, below), although it was much too bright for comfortable viewing in our darkened room. We did adjust the advanced controls for the best color temperature and again had to make a compromise because the Vizio's color fluctuated so much depending on brightness. We settled on calibrating mid- and low tones as accurately as possible at the expense of bluer bright areas, but the results were much less satisfying than we've achieved on other LCDs, from Vizio or otherwise. For our full user-menu controls, check out Tips & Tricks, above.

After adjusting the Vizio, we sat back to watch some scenes from The Last Samurai on HD-DVD and were able to compare the Vizio GV46L HDTV directly to a few other LCDs we had on hand: the JVC LT-40FN97, the Samsung LN-S4096D, the Sharp LC-46D6U, and the Westinghouse LVW-47w1. All of these sets are 1080p models that cost more than the Vizio, but even with those considerations, we felt the GV46L HDTV fell a bit short. Its black levels were significantly brighter than any of them, so the letterbox bars above and below the image appeared lighter, and dark scenes, such as when the group of Samurai charge the hapless musket wielders, lacked the punchy impact that deeper black levels can deliver. Our measurements confirmed that the GV46L's black levels were also lighter than those of the company's 42-inch LCDs.

Decent black levels also lead to decent saturation, and while the Vizio's colors were also less punchy as a result of its lighter blacks, our main complaint color-wise had to do with the set's inaccurate color temperature (a.k.a. grayscale). Specifically, dark areas of the picture became too red and bright areas too blue, regardless of the changes we made. In the scene that where Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe) contemplates seppuku, neutral areas such as the rice paper walls and the woven tatami mats appeared too red, as did the actors' faces. Black and near-black areas such as shadows, on the other hand, were tinged too blue. We'd reduced the color control to compensate for the GV46L's slight red push and primary colors were commendably accurate, but the discoloring effects of the uneven grayscale made the colors in most scenes seem off.

Many LCD TVs that we've tested recently don't change the image quality much when viewed from off-angle, but in comparison, the GV46L HDTV did. When we sat on either end of the couch, we noticed that the opposite side of the screen became lighter and slightly more red than the rest, and the effect increased the farther off-angle we moved. The other LCDs in the room again performed better in this regard. We also noticed that, like a lot of flat LCDs we've tested, the Vizio's screen wasn't uniform across its surface; in this case, the edges were brighter then the middle when seen from straight on. As with all other LCDs, the GV46L reflected less room light than a plasma, such as the Panasonic TH-50PH9UK we had on hand.

Since the other models have 1080p native resolution, you might expect them to appear much sharper than the Vizio, but that wasn't the case. Sure, in the most highly detailed areas of Samurai, an incredibly sharp source, we did see slightly more detail; the weave in the tatami mat was a bit clearer in one scene, and the thatch of a rooftop appeared slightly more detailed in another. Overall, however, we had to look very hard to see the difference, even on similarly sized sets such as the Sharp and the Westinghouse. As ever, differences in native resolution were much harder to discern than differences in color or contrast ratio (black level).

The front of the Vizio GV46L HDTV declares the presence of Faroudjia's DCDi processing, so we expected good things out of its standard-def performance, and for the most part, the Vizio delivered. Going through the tests on the HQV Benchmark DVD, the Vizio smoothed jagged edges as well as any TV we've tested and engaged 2:3 pull-down quickly. We did notice that we had to increase the sharpness control to see all of the detail in a distant stone bridge, for example, which makes the set's global sharpness setting a problem. When set to maximum, the Motion noise reduction slider did an excellent job of ridding low-quality video of snowy, moving motes in the background, but unfortunately, large-scale motion across the image became fuzzy and ghosted when we set the slider very high. We ended up setting it at 4, which did little to clean up the noise but was at least less prone to ghosting, where a faint afterimage trails the main image. The Digital noise reduction setting didn't do much that we could discern.