Vizio SV421XVT

Vizio SV421XVT

While it has a low price for a 42-inch, 240Hz HDTV, this Vizio set doesn’t create a great picture. The Vizio SV421XVT has a 42-inch screen, a 240Hz refresh rate, and multimedia playback from USB drives, all for an estimated street price of $900 (as of 9/25/2009). But poorly rendered detail and color, plus problems with digital artifacts, mar the viewing experience. Judges in the PC World Labs' image quality tests found that the SV421XVT rendered an acceptable image, but also that it had a hard time displaying fine detail and color often looked inaccurate. Depending on the clip we were watching, we found the image occasionally flat, brownish, too dark, or too orange. I also noticed a lack of detail in black clothing in a nighttime fancy-dress party scene from Chapter 11 of the Blu-ray release of The Dark Knight (a scene that three other people felt was too dark). Another judge noted that the grass in a 1080i football clip looked flat and lacked definition. But the biggest problems came from digital artifacts--those jumping and scrambled pixels that occur when an HDTV has trouble decoding a signal.