Vizio SV471XVT

Vizio SV471XVT

For a 47-inch HDTV, the Vizio SV471XVT is priced nicely, and it is generally easy to use, but its picture quality is merely average. No doubt about it: An estimated street price of $1219 (as of 9/22/2009) sounds good for a 47-inch, 240Hz LCD HDTV--especially one with multimedia capabilities and a terrific remote. But the Vizio SV471XVT is no bargain when it comes to image quality. Our test jury was not particularly impressed with the SV471XVT's picture clarity: The TV struggled with moving objects on screen, and occasionally had trouble with still objects, too--it displayed plenty of digital artifacts and pixelation in the PC World Labs' image quality tests. Halos of garbled pixels surrounded running players in a 720p baseball clip. Artifacts around small objects appeared in a 720p clip from Wheel of Fortune. Two of the three 1080i clips also had artifacts, and a scene from the Phantom of the Opera DVD had a halo even around someone walking slowly (artifacting is usually more of a problem with fast-motion sequences). The SV471XVT did better with Blu-ray discs screening at its native 1080p resolution, but even here I saw moiré patterns in images of the Hong Kong skyline--shot in the large IMAX film format--in Chapter 9 of the Blu-ray version of The Dark Knight.