Flatter Than Flat

How much does a TV’s aesthetic affect your buying decision? Consumers have proclaimed their preference for flat-panel TVs over bulkier designs, but just how flat does the panel need to be?

Hitachi’s UltraThin 1.5 Series of LCDs measure just (surprise, surprise) 1.5 inches deep.

Does its performance earn its step up in price, or is the UT37X902’s beauty only skin deep?

These panels certainly have sex appeal, with their svelte form, black sapphire finish, and rounded base; but that beauty comes at a premium price. The UT37X902 is a 37-inch, 1080p monitor that costs $2,299.

Attaining that slim depth required Hitachi to make some sacrifices. The connection panel has just two video inputs—HDMI and RGB—plus an audio mini-jack and RS-232. The UT37X902 is an HDTV monitor, meaning it lacks internal tuners and requires a cable/satellite box or Hitachi’s optional Audio Video Center ($299).

This add-on tuner module includes ATSC/NTSC/Clear-QAM tuners and offers three HDMI and two component video inputs. The monitor does have a speaker panel that sounds surprisingly full for such a thin design.

The UT37X902 has a 120Hz frame rate and features Hitachi’s Reel120 technology, designed to reduce judder in film sources. The monitor’s basic 120Hz implementation uses black-frame insertion to reduce motion blur, and I found it to be very successful with faster-moving sports and text crawls.

You can choose to enable Reel120, which interpolates new frames to get rid of the judder or stuttering movement created when a 24-frames-per-second film source is converted for output on a standard 60Hz display. With various DVD and Blu-ray movies, Reel120’s performance proved inconsistent.

When it works well, it produces clean, super-smooth motion, but sometimes it slips out of sync or seems to do nothing at all. In the case of one Blu-ray, Mission Impossible III, Reel120 introduced blatant image smearing. Frankly, I’m bothered more by artifacts than film judder, so I preferred to leave Reel120 off.

This panel also uses Hitachi’s In-Plane Switching (IPS) Pro technology, which works differently than the type of liquid crystal technology most other companies use (called twisted nematic, for the tech savvy).

While both have their strengths and weaknesses, IPS's main strength is a better viewing angle than you'd expect with an LCD. Indeed, the UT37X902 retains excellent image saturation and color fidelity at much wider viewing angles than most LCDs, at least from side to side. The display’s vertical viewing angle is more limited, so you don’t want to mount this panel too high up on the wall.

With only minor tweaks to the basic picture controls, this Hitachi can produce a very attractive picture with HDTV and Blu-ray sources. In the Cinema picture mode and Warm color temperature, both colors and skin tones look pleasingly natural.

Greens don’t have that oversaturated, neon quality you often see in flat panels. One setting you’ll want to experiment with is the sharpness control. Set it too high, and the monitor shows some edge enhancement, or artificial sharpness and ringing around hard edges. Setting it too low will cause hard edges to look overly soft and diffuse.

At the proverbial “just right” setting, the UT37X902 does a great job rendering fine detail in HD sources, and it includes a dot-for-dot mode to display 1080i/1080p sources with no overscan. Standard-def DVDs also fare well, boasting good detail and few deinterlacing artifacts.

In other processing areas, the Hitachi’s performance was less reliable. When trying to evaluate the display’s handling of 1080i film sources, I got consistently differing results depending on which Blu-ray player I used, which is quite odd. The monitor passed my tests more often than it failed, and I didn’t see artifacts in 1080i HDTV content.

Just to be safe, though, I’d recommend you mate the UT37X902 with a Blu-ray player that outputs 1080p/24 or has excellent processing of its own. The picture was sometimes a bit noisy, and I noticed more MPEG compression with SDTV satellite signals than I normally do. In general, the UT37X902 can beautifully reproduce high-quality sources, but it doesn’t do much to help lesser-quality sources look better.

Like most LCDs, the UT37X902 is capable of a lot of light output. Even at its minimum backlight setting, the monitor is fairly bright, which gives the picture great contrast in a daytime viewing environment. The trade-off is that its black level is only average for a traditional LCD. Blacks look grey; and, in a dark room, the picture lacks that extra bit of depth and richness that you get from the best panels.

From a performance standpoint, the UT37X902 can definitely impress and overcomes a number of common LCD issues. It’s a great choice for an everyday display, especially for someone who watches a lot of HD content. Unfortunately, its limited input panel means you probably need to invest in the optional tuner box or an external switcher; better yet, consider a high-quality video processor that can clean up all sources before they reach the monitor. Of course, whichever route you choose will add expense to what’s already a pricey proposition.

That brings us back to the original question. For $2,299, you can get a larger, more fully featured LCD that performs well. Hitachi has chosen to make the UT37X902 (and its 42- and 47-inch brothers) a statement piece, targeted at a higher-end consumer who wants to be on the cutting edge of TV design and will gladly pay for it.

DESCRIPTION
37-inch LCD HDTV monitor, integrated speaker bar, detachable base

RESOLUTION
1,920 x 1,080 pixels

CONNECTIONS
One HDMI input, one D-Sub 15-pin RGB input, one stereo audio mini-jack, RS-232

DIMENSIONS
23.88 x 36.88 x 1.56 inches (hwd, without stand)

PRICE/CONTACT
Price: $2,299
Contact: (800) HITACHI, hitachi.com