LT-46149 Build Quality and Setup Menu

We took a look at the Mitsubishi LT-46148 46-inch LCD back in August and felt that it was a good TV with some potential for improvement. Mitsubishi jumped back at us with the new LT-46149 and asked us to review it. While the features, video section and menus are nearly identical, the 149 series offers a brand new 16-speaker sound projector to deliver Dolby Digital 5.1 surround from just a bottom-mounted sound bar. Why do I have an inkling that this is going to make a lot of aesthetically-minded "significant others" very happy? We dialed in this television and it actually did a pretty bang-up job of sending surround sound to our ears - and all from a single thin speaker.

Build Quality and Features

The Mitsubishi LT-46149 is a great-looking television. It's... sleek. It features a beautiful piano gloss black finish and a bezel that is a scant 7/8" thick which tapers down to just 5/8" at the screen. This is the kind of flat panel television, at just less than 5 inches thick, that begs to be hung on the wall. We semi-obliged it and mounted it to our StudioTech DP-2 flat panel TV stand. The included desktop stand (which we quickly removed) looks like it was made by the same guy who designs Batman's weapons. It's a curvy thing with legs that I'd describe as "sexy" if that didn't make me weird... oh boy. Anyway, the thing that really sets apart this television is the single row of 16 speakers that run across the soundbar positioned below the screen. When I first saw this I scratched my head and figured someone over at Mitsubishi had run into some extra drivers they wanted to get rid of. Surely, no one is selling a television to consumers with an integrated soundbar? You're supposed to sell those separately... for hundreds of dollars. I apparently hadn't done my research on this model, for Mitsubishi is attempting to provide the answer to the age-old question:

"OK, I managed to hang my flat panel on the wall... now what am I going to do about speakers?"
- A. J. Consumer

We'll save the audio evaluation for later, but let's suffice it to say that lots of people are going to be very interested in this display. It potentially solves lots of aesthetic speaker placement problems and it looks good in the process. I will address the remote control, which is partially backlit and no different than the one found with the LT-46148. It's simplistic and our biggest gripe is a lack of direct input controls. Why on earth anyone would want to press an Input button and then scroll to the right device is beyond me. In a world of RF remote controls, we need each and every manufacturer on board with discrete input selection. Anything short of that is downright inconvenient.

Setup and Menu System

We covered the Setup menu in our review of the nearly identical LT-46148 LCD television, but I felt it important to help you locate some of the more commonly-used items you'll want to adjust or at least check out. First off, the menu is set up in a quasi pictorial grid, with major items down the left and context-aware visual submenus which appear across the top. It's not particularly ergonomic but it gets the job done. One thing you'll need to get used to is that if you click up or down with the remote while in a submenu item you are changing that item. Moving left or right, or exiting via the Menu or Exit buttons are the way to save settings and/or move onward. Exit gets you out of the menu, while Menu backs you up one place.

AV Menu

The AV Menu is a larger menu that contains not only the primary video settings like Brightness, Contrast, Color Temp and PerfectColor, but also access to the Smooth120Hz motion settings. The Smooth120Hz film motion setting, which ponderously exists under the "Global" submenu, can be set to either Standard, High, or Off. Mitsubishi claims its Smooth120Hz Motion mode not only doubles 60Hz rates and adds interpolated frames, it also reduces judder in film content.

In the audio menu, you'll have the ability to tell the Mitsubishi that you have a subwoofer. This is handy as the TV allows you to use one of the analogue RCA outputs as a subwoofer output. The menu then allows you to set the subwoofer output level. This is certainly handy and works well since the integrated sound projector is, for the most part, limited to frequencies above 100Hz. Go ahead and add a sub - you won't regret it.

PerfectColor - Still Pretty Much a Visual Toy

I didn't find any use for Mitsubishi's PerfectColor. I don't find it to be very perfect, nor does it seem to help the overall color response. To me, it seems to be a very ingrained toy put in there by some product manager who can't let go of the nice gimmicky name. Consumers should understand that Mitsubishi is the custom installer's best friend - at least the ones that do calibrations. For as long as I can remember they haven't ceded to recent trends of allowing consumers to calibrate RGB Gain/Cut levels on their TVs. Instead, Mitsubishi continues to deliberately lock these settings away in their service menus. This is great for calibrators (they can charge people money to calibrate their sets) and not-so-great for consumers (who find they can't make good use of that new SpyderTV Pro system they bought for Christmas).

Auto Input Sensing

The LT-46149 has a neat feature that automatically switches to the most current input. That means that if you are watching Netflix on your Roku box and you power up the DVD player, the TV will switch away on you. It also means that when you add a new device the system will pop up a window asking you what it is and how you'd like to name it. That's actually pretty cool and it seemed to work fine for a single switch. Where it falls a bit flat is when you turn off a component. The system doesn't immediately search for the last active input. Instead it just leaves you on a blank screen.