Greetings

I hope to document a couple of major issues that I am seeing in about 80% of the Hitachi units that I happen upon in stores and with my clients. In both cases, my recommendation to the client has unfortunately been to get Hitachi to either fix or replace the set.

Issue One - Ghosting / Echoing

All items in the image have a small ghost attached to the image. It is most easily seen with a test pattern such as the AVIA resolution charts like the TVL 200 chart. Look at the numbers in the chart and see if you can see small ghosts next to the numbers ...

The ghosting tends to extend 2 to 4 mm off set from the letters ... and not just on one side of the letter ... but both sides. How this affects your image is demonstrated in a disc such as Lord of the Rings ... opening chapter with Gandalf talking to Frodo on the wagon. Look at Gandalf's beard. The ghosting of all parts of the image make the fine details of the beard vanish. You are essentially looking at an image with ghost upon ghost upon ghost ...

Not all Hitachi sets have this problem. Be aware of it.

Issue Two - Pastel Colours

I learn more about this as time goes on. It is best described as an image that appears to be pasty. There is no colour depth to the image. Subtle gradations of colour are not present. Images appear flat ... like looking at an image that only has 256 colours versus a 16 million colour image.

It can sometimes be identified by a certain look to the image. It looks like there is a strange transparent film hovering between the viewer and the image itself. Close examination shows a funny digital motion in this film.

A program that I use to demonstrate this pastel issue is the film Bring It On. The opening cheerleader routine has a lot of flesh tones and the pastel problem makes the flesh tones look flat ... lacking in depth. Another very obvious sign of the problem is in the skirts of the girls. When the problem is present ... the skirts are almost completely devoid of detail. It is simply red and a dark shadow. Two tones of colour ... A solarization effect.

I have seen the effect on the video and ant inputs too in addition to the component inputs. One client in Ottawa had a HTPC set up as well, but was feeding DVD into the TV via the DVI input. Through the DVI input, the pastel problem was not present at all.

Final Thoughts ...

Hitachi has not publically acknowledged these problems and it is understandable why they would choose not to. Can you spell PR nightmare? From what I can gather, there are no current fixes for either of these problems so the only solution is to replace the unit ...

I have asked myself the question on why I am the only one of very few calibrators that have talked about the problem. Am I the only one that sees the problem? It is as clear as day to the client once I point out what it looks like and it is even more clear after a full calibration of the TV.

It is a statistical impossibility that only I am the one that continually stumbles upon defective unit after unit. Something else is going on here and it may very well have to do with certain calibrators keeping their mouths shut and taking the money and running with it.

Regards