A quick review:
They come well packaged but will probably need to two people to handle due to size and weight: around 36kg gross, 29kg nett.
It's well constructed and nicely finished - a well polished product, not over-styled but presently modestly and very smartly.
The remote is very good; responsive, well laid out - stylish and functional. The telly responds well to the remote too, quick to come out of standby and navigate the copious menus
which are equally well-designed too.
The first thing I adjusted was the backlight level. Initially set to the max. of 10, I moved it to 0 which helped the black level quite markedly - I would have preferred it to adjust even lower but it was still very useful and maintained an extremely bright and vibrant screen. Backlight evenness was very good but not perfect.
Viewing angles were excellent with colours staying even until the very extremes and only contrast dropping very slightly off-centre.
I've not seen any dead pixels or sub-pixels to date.
I bought this to drive primarily from a PC - I don't have a DVD player let alone any 1080p funkyness, so up i hooked it with my ebay bargain £11 5m DVI-HDMI cable.
By far and away it's the most flexible TV I've seen as regard timing and sync from a PC. It behaves largely as if it were a monitor.
I gave it dozens and dozens of different settings through PowerStrip and it displayed virtually all of them.
Mainly I was in search of the illusive 1080p.
The cable I use is on the edge, it's at the suggested maximum length for a DVI cable and it was made on a budget.
The best image was obtained with 1080i, It was very crisp indeed. I prefer a slightly desaturated image and after setting this i went to look at a few photos taken by a friend on a visit to Nepal.
Wow. Simply wow. With a decent camera this screen is immense for viewing photos, bright and incredibly vibrant - very life-like. Very impressive.
Snapped quickly with the camera held in the hands (I'll take some with a tripod later):
First picture
Desktop animation suffered in this interlaced mode, but for films it looked great. I acquired some Imax Amazon footage in 1440x1080p and excellent it was to view.
I could happily sync the screen at 25Hz and 30Hz interlaced and virtually everything I tried inside and outside these ranges. It reported a maximum of 37Hz to the graphics driver.
I tested the screen with 2 graphics cards (I'll probably try a 3rd later on); an ATI 9700 and a Nvidia Ti4200, both with fairly up to date drivers.
The ATI was better behaved and also had overlay gamma control which was much better than the still useful but limited handful of selections on the telly itself.
As the gfx drivers had defaulted to an interlaced screen when I had set it to 1080p initially, I went into PowerStrip and unchecked the interlaced button. A couple of seconds later the screen had resync'ed to 1080p@40Hz. Like in interlaced mode I could change this merrily without the screen getting too stressed. The max. of the cable I was using is 60Hz @ 1080p so I didn't exceed this.
Desktop animation became very smooth but image crispness suffered. I tried everything I could in PowerStrip to sharpen up the image (also tried the telly's own sharpness setting) but I couldn't get it looking like interlaced mode. It was still doing 1:1 but on close examination of the screen it was vertically blurring the pixels. Horizontally it was sharp as a pin. I can only assume this is how it internally handles 1080p signals. I shall email the helpful support staff at Mirai Europe to try and get some clarity on this issue.. See the photos of the pixels - a single off-pixel behaves strangely; the pixel above and below are darker and the ones above and below them are slightly lighter.
Second picture 1080i Third picture 1080p
DVD, 720p and 1080p all still looked very good on 1080p but still images had lost a bit of ping.
I haven't tested sound yet although I could well hook up a stand-alone DVD player via SCART and later on I'll certainly be installing PomPom's Mutant Storm too, for what could be the ultimate test of the screen's gaming credentials. That game is very rapid, colourful and played over a dark, often black screen.
This screen has a lot going for it.
Any questions I'll try my best to answer,
cheers.