inches and over

I bought the RCA D52W15, which is essentially the D52W20 without the screen shield. The price, quality of picture and overall style were the selling points for me. Normally I would buy a Sony or other Japanese brand well known for quality, but this set just looked better than any others I had seen. The cabinet styling has a very slim look. Many sets looked big and blocky from the front as well as the backs being made with particle-board where the RCA is build like the DPL receivers using light but sturdy looking plastic. I noticed also that every set with a screen shield (just about all) was reflecting the lights of the showroom where the RCA has the mat finish (D52W15 only) and barely reflected any room lighting giving a better picture without distraction. I don't have kids or pets living in the house so I'm not worried about the screen being damaged. I am very happy so far with the performance and look in my home. As of this writing I have had it a little over a month. I bought a service contract, With a large purchase like this and being an RCA, I don't want to take chances. I have experimented with the settings and have gotten satisfaction in viewing even poor quality video. I notice even on the same stations some shows look stunning while others look poor and out of focus, so it's not the TV. I am sure the more expensive HDTV sets have more features for setting the picture parameters, but I find this set has enough to get great viewing. I find the "Cinerama" screen format is best for most 3:4 ratio broadcasts where you want the whole screen filled with least distortion on the edges. I find when watching widescreen DVDs, to eliminate black bars still seen because of being filmed in a non standard aspect ratio, I use the "16:9 up/down" mode and center the picture and loose very little picture while filling my whole screen. I hate seeing black or grey bars. I have set the contrast down to about 35%, it will save on CRT phosphor wear and then juggling color and black levels it looks better to me than the factory settings that tend to be over saturated in most cases. The audio is good, but It doesn't matter, being I am hooked up to a good A/V receiver with surround sound. Even commercials sound and look good.

At first I thought the RCA D52W20 was an excellent purchase, but over the next few days of ownership I started to notice the many, many flaws that ultimately led to my returning this product after 20 days and buying a Samsung instead.

In order of importance, the significant problems with this set are:

1) The screen edge regions did not produce a sharp image.
2) The convergence needed to be adjusted twice daily as there was a marked drift on both the blue and red projectors.
3) There is only 1 (center) manual convergence point. Similar sets from Sony, Toshiba, etc give you 9 points to adjust.
4) Ghost streaks appeared to the right of bright objects in high contrast situations.

This being said, the RCA generally produced a "good" picture, and who really watches the edge of the screen anyway, right? ;-)

Bottom line - this set is available at a discount price, but it also delivers discount quality.

I just had my TV arrive last week. So far I couldn't be happier. The picture is ok in regular mode and the HDTV picture is outstanding. The look of the TV is very sleak and modern. It has some cool features like PIP and push button recording to your VCR (I have tivo so I wouldn't use that feature). All in all I'm very happy with the TV. Also, I paid just $1050 for it on sale at Circuit City. I think it was mismarked. Can't beat that deal! I just hope it proves to be reliable in the long term.