Hitachi LE46S704

Hitachi UltraVision LE46S704 46-Inch LCD TV

By today's standards, the Hitachi UltraVision LE46S704 feels like a like a no-frills television. You can plug in a flash drive and enjoy your photos, but not your music or videos. This 46-inch HDTV has no networking or Internet capabilities whatsoever. That may seem like a reasonable limitation given the $1300 price (as of September 20, 2010), but the HDTV's problems with fast-moving images seem less excusable. The LE46S704 performed at its best in our image quality tests when the people on screen stood still. It did reasonably well in our Wheel of Fortune test, where there is plenty to look at but movement is limited; the picture was clear, with good skin tones and fine details. But the set behaved differently in our Blu-ray Mission: Impossible III test. Here both the people and the camera seldom stop moving. In a scene where Tom Cruise runs up a brick wall, the judges noted horrible pixelation all around him. One judge praised the excellent motion fidelity in the dark scenes, but the dark scenes in that segment of the movie are relatively static. Similarly, judges observed jumping building floors and blurred parallel lines in moving camera shots from The Dark Knight, as well as flicker in our diagonal panning test, and a billboard that behaved like an animated GIF in our baseball clip.