Sanyo's New 47" 1080p Lcd.

[RohanV]

Well I’ve been lurking here for a while now & thought I’d post this review up.

About a fortnight ago I bought one of the soon to be released 47” 1080p Sanyo LCD panels, the LCD47XR2.

To be perfectly honest, normally I wouldn’t buy a Sanyo anything, but one of their Reps had been in to my office recently and invited a few of us in AV to come see the new panels. We did, & with an appropriate tasty Blue-Ray source through HDMI, they looked very very good.

This is the panel, HERE

They aren’t released to the public as far as I know, ours were from the first batch to arrive in Australia, And due to contacts, I’ll admit I got it at trade price, which is just over half the RRP. These screens, when released, are expected to retail at the cheap end of the 1080HD LCD market - around $4500 at a guess.

So I plugged it all in, component vid & optical audio from the DVD player, very nice! Contrast & brightness needed some tweaking so I ran some test patterns through it and established my ratios, everything is good and I’m very happy with the picture.

The detatchable speakers on the side are worth a mention too, they're ported at the back and deliver an unexpectedly good level of undistorted sound, there is no decent EQ option, however it's a nice flat sound and i do have mine in quite a "live" room.

To try them out i got my trusty Led Zepplin DVD out and gave it a whirl. Sounds perfectly good for stereo speakers, of course running through a reciever & large system is always going to be better. But for general watching of TV, they'll do just fine.

The remote is simple & effective for controlling the TV it has lots of buttons & a joystick, but more on that little gem later…

It came with a normal stand attached, and also a very industrial wall mounting bracket as an option. It’s a good looking panel, the finishes are sleek and black which I like, the screen itself is nice and bright even in a sunlit room, but a mate of mine just recently bought the 46” 1080p Sony panel and this Sanyo is admittedly slightly inferior to the Sony in sharpness and overall image quality. Also I’ll admit the finish on the Sony is pretty snazzy with a glass bezel & LED lit name badge - But for less than half the price, I’m quite content & not complaining, its still a true HD panel & displays with high expectations.

Now for the gripes:

We’ll start small

The panel has all the usual selection of inputs. 1x HDMI, 1x D-sub, 2x component + RCA stereo, 2x composite + RCA stereo, Optical audio, Y/C and RS232 control input.

The inputs are all mounted in a small recess at the back of the panel, right in the middle, with the inputs all facing directly down at the floor, so when putting a cable in, you insert it directly up. This is pretty fiddly as the input panel is very small and all RCA connectors are in close proximity.

Stubby fingered users be warned; get someone else to set up your component video to avoid elevated blood pressure.

I’d like to mention that there is no 3rd input on the side of the TV anywhere, This is ok from a cable management point of view when mounting the panel on a wall, but from a “swapping components occasionally” or “I’ll just plug in my Playstation2” point of view, its pretty damn annoying having to move the TV on its stand and fiddle around the back constantly.

Next up, it has 1 internal analogue tuner.

Yes, this huge, brand-spankin’ new 1080p panel does not have a digi tuner in it, not SD, not HD, absolutely nothing but a bog-stock analogue tuner. Very very disappointing, as on a panel this big, standard RF reception sticks out like the proverbial dogs balls & is unwatchable even with perfect reception.

So no inbuilt digi-tuner, but that’s easily fixed, as I’m about to buy a toppy 7000HDPVR for my HD tuner & PVR duties.

Those features are slightly irritating but no big deal on a cheap panel, however this next one is a seriously poor design effort by Sanyo;

I did my research & bought a harmony 880 yesterday to appease the technologically-retarded amongst my family. Only to come in to work today and have a fellow AV engineer & screen purchaser tell me “Hey, just spoke to our Sanyo rep & the TVs don’t recognise hard IR codes for switching inputs…”

Let me back up.

To select an input, you press the “input” button on the remote and are presented with an OSD of all the usual flavours of input (see above). The remote has a prominent joystick in the middle, and you scroll around the choices with said joystick, until you find the one you want, then click the joystick in, like a mobile phone, to select your chosen input.

At no point does the remote actually send an IR code other than “input button” then a random number of “up” & “down” signals from the joystick, then “enter”

The input selection is done all within the device, and programming in for example: “menu-up-up-enter” isn’t an option, as it doesn’t default back to any particular input, it remembers which input you used last, and stays with that input next time you turn the TV on.

In layman’s terms, throw away any learning remote you may want to use because some utter moron at Sanyo has devised the most un-intuitive remote system I’ve ever come across.

[nerd segment]

The inputs can however be selected by RS-232 code, not IR, so as a work-around, If I wanted to, I could fork out 500 bucks for an IR to RS232 black box, which I could then program to send my input selection signal into the back of the TV via RS-232, depending on the corresponding IR signal my remote was sending to the black box…

Any simpler ideas anyone?

[/end nerd segment]

This is Infuriating news to me, seeing as I bought that damn harmony remote yesterday!

I really really hope that Sanyo realise this complete cock-up (believe me, I’ll be letting them know, as will my workmates ) and get their asses into gear and release a firmware update containing some hard IR code for input selection. they dont even have to reprogram the remote, just the panels ability to recognise input selection from IR as a basic function.

However

As it’s not a commercially available unit yet, I doubt I’ll be able to fix this shambles for a while until they get several hundred complaints from people whinging that their programmable remotes wont work.

All things considered, It’s a great display monitor for the price considering the size & resolution its capable of, but its not a good TV by any stretch of the imagination, it simply hasn’t been fool-proofed enough for a standard consumer market. If I didn’t work in the industry, I’d probably have no idea that RS232 control was even an option. So I really hope Sanyo pick up the ball on this one and fix it ASAP.

Rohan

[mrmaxwell1503559518]

Thanks for this. My Sanyo rep also just told me about this and for the trade price it's very good value. Nice to now the pros and cons....