Ask a lighting designer what the three primary colors are, and he’ll answer red, green, and blue. Ask a printing   professional the same question, and she’ll answer cyan, yellow, and magenta. Both answers are correct. The former refers to additive colors that when combined in proportion produce white. The latter refers to subtractive colors, which produce black (or an absence of color) when combined.

Printing giant HP surely knows a thing or two about color science, and its recent foray into high-definition displays includes DLP rear-projection sets along with plasma and flat-panel LCD TVs. The largest of its LCD range, the LC3700N, is as feature-packed as any out there, and has a full suite of color management adjustments that go far beyond the standard color controls typically provided with other sets.

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Most flat-panel sets come with a generic remote control, but not this HP. The sleek black handset matches the look of the TV, and the menu controls—a silver cross in the middle—are easy to find in the dark. (Clcik image to enlarge)

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A handsome unit with demure cosmetics, the TV is framed in soft gloss black plastic that minimizes reflections. The companion detachable side-mounted speakers are similarly subdued so that in a suitably darkened room, only the screen image itself is visible. Around back, the input and output connectivity is exemplary, with IEEE-1394 iLink (FireWire) and analog computer connections, including both DVI and HDMI digital video connections. A full HDTV (not just a monitor), the set includes standard- and high-definition tuners for over-the-air broadcasts. Its CableCard slot offers analog and digital cable compatibility without the need for a cable box.

Within the picture control adjustments, we find choices for color temperature and settle on the Mid-Low setting, which most closely matches the 6,500-degree Kelvin ideal, deviating only slightly (within a few percent or so) over most of the visual range. Only with darker gray test patterns do we note a decided shift toward blue, but that seems endemic to the flat-panel LCD breed. One very useful feature is a picture brightness optimizer that senses ambient room lighting and adjusts output accordingly by varying the amount of screen backlighting. It works quite well, dropping the output from the nominal (and quite bright) 59 footlamberts to a much more pleasing 19 footlamberts in a darkened setting. HP obviously expects that some users might wish for an even brighter picture—turning up the screen backlighting to the highest setting provides us with an astonishingly bright 109 footlamberts, making the LC3700N by far the brightest set we’ve ever tested.After making minor adjustments to the basic controls using test patterns from the Avia and Video Essentials DVDs, we then examine the set’s basic colorimetry and find a very good, but not quite ideal, result. Blue and red renditions are excellent, while the green is somewhat off, producing a slight bias toward cyan. The set’s color management system provides a trio of six-axis hue, saturation, and value controls that will keep budding Botticellis busy for hours tweaking the picture to suit their fancy, but most users should be entirely satisfied once an installer has adjusted the basic controls properly.

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A silver swiveling stand for tabletop use accompanies the LC3700N, but the set can also be mounted directly on the wall for those who do not want to waste their precious floor space on a TV set. (Click image to enlarge)

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With the test equipment stowed away, it’s off to Rome in glorious high definition. HBO’s superb swords-and-sandals mini-epic—which, like most serious episodic television, is filmed and not shot in video—looks exceptionally detailed on the HP, with rich, vibrant color and excellent tone gradation, even in darkly lit interior scenes which often prove troublesome.
 
Live high-definition video, including basketball and football games, is similarly crisp, and the set shows no evidence of white crush on brightly lit white team jerseys, where an overabundance of brightness often destroys fine details.

With standard-definition sources such as DVD, the results are somewhat disappointing. Much signal processing occurs when standard-definition video is upconverted to the LCD panel’s native high-definition display rate and resolution. Here we note a number of anomalies, including more jagged edges that we’re used to seeing with recent high-definition sets, and quite noticeable edge enhancement, especially on sharp color transitions, and regardless of the sharpness setting. In particular, highly saturated reds suffer from the kind of streaking associated with the chroma upsampling error common to some progressive-scan DVD players, and we also observe an unusual variance in horizontal resolution with test patterns, something we have not seen before.
 
The LC3700N supports the high-resolution widescreen WXGA computer video format, and the set makes a dandy big-screen computer monitor. Gamers will find much to like as well, since the set’s LCD panel achieves a speedy 8-millisecond pixel response time, which means fast-action games will not suffer from image smearing. Toss the supplied side-mounted plastic enclosure speakers though—they do not achieve even mediocre fidelity—and instead opt for in-wall speakers or a standalone subwoofer and stereo satellite speaker setup, either of which can take better advantage of the set’s Virtual Dolby Surround function.

While the LC3700N television does not impress us with standard-definition sources, it delivers a satisfyingly sharp and colorful picture—not to mention brightness galore—for those who will use it primarily as a high-definition television and/or computer monitor.DESCRIPTION
37-inch diagonal LCD flat-panel PC/HDTV display with swivel tabletop stand. Wall mount optional

DISPLAY CAPABILITIES
Native 16:9 widescreen panel displays 16:9 and 4:3 images; accepts 480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i, and computer video up to WXGA resolution

RESOLUTION
1366 x 768 pixels

CONNECTIONS
Video: Two multiformat component video inputs (480i, 480p, 720p, 1080i), S-video input, composite video input, DVI digital video input, HDMI digital audio/video input, dual IEEE-1394 iLink FireWire jacks, S-video output, composite video output, optical digital audio output, three RF inputs for analog over-the-air, digital OTA, and digital cable
Audio: Three stereo analog inputs via RCA jacks, one stereo analog output via RCA jacks
Control: RS-232 serial port for external controller

DIMENSIONS
25.5 x 46.5 x 12 inches (hwd, with stand and speakers)

PRICE/CONTACT
PRICE: $2,899
CONTACT: 800.752.0900, hp.com