The best time to buy an HDTV is always six months from now, when prices drift lower and technology gets better. At some point, it's time to jump in. After summer sales lagged, manufacturers are now tempting consumers in this back-to-football season with deals like $999 (list price) for a Westinghouse 42-inch LCD with 1080p resolution.
The big names - Samsung, Panasonic, Sony and Sharp - haven't yet jumped into the less-than-$1,000 pool, but Westinghouse did, with a recent price drop on the TX-42F430S. Coincidentally, it's the model I was hosting for an in-home trial.
This set arrived last year at $1,600, and no one blinked. The hi-def die-hards loved it, mostly because it was 1080p at a 720p price, it had four HDMI connections and superb video processing.
Earlier this year, when the price reached $1,200, the TX-42F430S was at least $600 less than similar brand-name sets. Vizio used the same strategy - good, though not spectacular, televisions at a great price - to become one of the top three flat-panel sellers in North America. CBS, which owns the venerable Westinghouse name, licensed it to Westinghouse Digital Electronics, a Santa Fe Springs, Calif., company that has ties to LCD-panel maker Chi Mei Optoelectronics of Taiwan.
Westinghouse then caught people's eye with bargain-basement, 1080p sets whose 1,920 x 1,080 pixels display every detail of hi-def television programming and Blu-ray movies. To see this extra detail on a 42-inch set, you must sit no more than 5 1/2 feet from the screen. (Sitting farther away? Look for a less expensive 720p set.)
The TX-42F430S offers more than technical enticements. It has a simple on-screen setup and convenient rear-panel connections in a cascading, side-firing arrangement. It also has all those HDMI connections - for a DVD player, game console or two and cable box - and a PC input.
The Westinghouse performed as well as some $2,000-plus sets I've subjected to the Silicon Optix HQV Benchmark hi-def test disc, too. It showed virtually no jagged-edge artifacts when converting an interlaced image (1080i) to progressive video (1080p) and only a brief moire when converting another sequence to video that was originally shot in film.
The Westinghouse lost me, though, on its inability to reproduce a dark shade of black. A deeper black level makes everything look better: Colors become more saturated, the image appears more dimensional, and shadow detail, like the ripples in Superman's cape, are more plainly visible.
The TX-42F430S also had poor off-axis viewing. The sharper the angle, the more washed-out the picture looked. These are common complaints about LCD sets, though. For a 42-inch, 1080p LCD with excellent video processing and a very good picture, the TX-42F430S is hard to overlook at the discounted $850. It will remain in Westinghouse's lineup at least through the end of the year. Let's see how quickly any of the big-name brands match it.
Not everyone has the room, or the money, for a big-screen HDTV. The cheapskate's hi-def alternative: a USB HDTV adapter like Hauppauge's WinTV-HVR-950Q ($99, hauppauge.com) that turns a computer into a TV. This Windows-only TV stick - a USB connector at one end and antenna jack at the other - receives both analog and digital over-the-air signals with an included mini-antenna. It also gets digital-cable programming. Once you've loaded the software onto a computer, you can watch, pause and record programming. Just insert the WinTV into a computer's USB 2.0 port, then sit back with the remote control. Despite the terrible reception in our office, I still managed to get 16 channels, including nine digital, on my PC. (Oprah, is that you?) The WinTV-Scheduler and TitanTV program guide made my PC a digital video recorder. Unlike cable or satellite service, though, there's no monthly fee. The WinTV needs some computer firepower and storage (about 5 gigabytes per hour of HD recording), but it's a cheap path to HDTV.
