52.jpgThe Vizio 52-inch 1080p LCD officially went on sale yesterday. Initial reviews are coming in from buyers who are posting on the AVS forum. I found an excellent review from forum user TheKal that seems the most genuine and well written—the review hits on all the important pros and cons I’ve noted with my GV47LF. There are lots of relevant details here for people choosing between the GV47LF and the GV52L. I’ll repost the review here, but I highly recommend checking out the latest posts on the GV52L forums. From TheKal:

“Well I am the previous owner of a GV47. I owned for almost a full 90 days however I returned it as I had a VERY uneven backlight with severe clouding and streaks during night time viewing in dark scenes. I have been looking at several HDTV’s for a while now so I feel I am pretty well qualified to describe the new Vizio. I have Time Warner digital cable and Toshiba HD-A2 HD DVD player.

First off, this thing is HUGE. I didn’t realize how overkill it was until I put it up on my wall. It looks monstrously bigger than the 47 I would have never thought 5″ would do so much. I am viewing this TV at about 10 feet eye ball to screen and while it is the perfect size picture for watching HD movies it is too big in my opinion for watching SD material. I will be playing with the zoom feature and will probably be watching SD material shrunk down to a more enjoyable size as SD material has tremendous artifacting and pixilation at this size and viewing distance. I don’t know how much of this can be improved on by the TV as I really think this is just a result of digital cable at 480 lines with a lot of compression. At 52″ and 10 feet you really see the quality of the source material as even HD cable looks far more noisy and artifacted than a real high definition disk where those 1080 vertical lines makes a huge difference on this big a set. IF you own this set and you do not own a HD DVD or Blu Ray player you are robbing yourself from the experience of this TV as everything else looks so overblown up and pixilated.


Anyway, the GV52 has significantly better sound quality than the GV47. We are talking night and day difference. GV52 probably has one of the best speaker setups of anything built into a flat panel on the market. The blacks on the GV52 are quite noticeably darker and blacker. I feel the picture is richer and more saturated looking giving it better depth and color intensity. I popped in the HD DVD version of Training Day, the picture was stunning in all the bright scenes, and as good as anything, you can find on the market. The black is absolutely an improvement over the GV47 however when watching the TV in the dark it is still not a true black but still a dark grey even with the backlight at 0 and the brightness/contrast turned down a few clicks. GV52 still lacks the ability to produce the deep blacks of Sharp or Samsung. On a brighter note, however the back light uniformity on my set is picture perfect from corner to corner in a pitch-dark room with a black screen. No clouding in the corners at all. I made sure to transport the set upright the entire time so this may have something to do with it. Unfortunately as mentioned earlier in the dark scenes, there does seem to be considerable shadow detail that is lost and there are plenty of these scenes in training day. The blacks appear to be a bit over saturated and I would love to hear any tuning adjustments from future guru’s to improve on this drawback as it is really the only flaw I can find with the TV PQ. So far, in playing with adjustments, the only way I can bring the shadow detail back is to turn up the brightness and contrast to where the TV looks washed out and the blacks are significantly greyer. This may make or break it for some people if you can live with the lack of shadow detail against black backgrounds this is a tremendous value for the money. I really hope some of the guys in here come up with some settings to clean up this problem as much as possible.


HDMI connectivity has been perfect and the on screen menu is far superior to that of the GV47. Overall, the set for sure has an overall newer generation look and feel about it. There are independent adjustments to move the picture left right up and down. By the way I also noticed the white bar noise at the top of the screen when I had the Cable DVR set to up convert SD to 1080i. Go into the DVR/Cable box settings and have it force SD programming to 480p and you will not have this problem and this will also unlock all the picture modes for SD 4:3 programming built in. If you are still unable to fix this problem, you can always shift the image up.

Anyway, so far this is my input if anybody has any questions I’d be happy to answer them I know there is many excited prospective buyers out there looking for some owner insight.

FYI there is no speaker hum whatsoever however; there is backlight buzz when the backlight is set less than 90. I really feel this is inherent in all Vizio’s due to the type of transformer they use to modulate the backlight. Bummer but it seems to be the way it is. On the brighter side, the PQ with a 90 backlight is much better than it was on the GV47, which would wash out with so much backlight so in most room lighting you will be more than happy with the backlight at 90 PQ.”