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Performance as a Television Display for Video Games

The trusty old Playstation 2 looked a bit mediocre on the 173MW. Games were noticeably aliased and none of the different picture modes could really put it on par with a regular television. Part of the problem we suspect is the default RCA cable and its relatively noisy signal. In any event, the picture quality looked pretty bad with Fifa 2002 and Virtua Fighter 4; bad enough to remind me about the old RF input days with the NES. Many artifacts could be seen on screen that were not nearly as noticeable as on a rear projection widescreen display using the same RCA cables. The noise problem was also apparent on the 173MP. Something of note though is that the picture quality is much better on the MW as compared to the 172MP. In particular the streaking is noticeably improved on the 173WM. In Fifa for example there would be a persistent blur behind a running player that was very distracting on the 172MP but was not present on the MW. In PIP mode the noise was much less apparent and the picture was quite pleasing to look at.

Performance as a Television Display for Video

LCDs do not deal with noise very well. This can be seen with the difference between a regular VGA cable and a DVI cable. The DVI provides a sharper picture overall. To be frank, DVD video quality was kind of poor with the Playstation 2 outputting through the RCA input. The picture was much sharper when using a software DVD decoder. With the PIP mode we put in two copies of "The 5th Element", one running off of the computer and one through the Playstation 2. To compare we took a look at the video in both PIP and full screen mode. We would have it in a 50/50 split mode in PIP, swap the sources and turn off PIP. There were a lot of visual artifacts with the PS2 version giving it a very pixelated look while the softDVD version on the computer looked pretty sharp. In a smaller PIP window, the video looked better but as with Playstation 2 games, the picture quality was much superior on a rear projection screen and none of these artifacts appeared.

As mentioned before, the MW does offer SVideo and Component In in addition to the standard RCA jacks as well as the TV Tuner. We suspect that the quality will improve somewhat with a higher quality connection but it is still mind boggling as to how bad the RCA input looked. It would be advisable to grab a higher end DVD player for the 173MW because otherwise the picture quality is going to be pretty lackluster with the RCA inputs. Video game aficionados may also want to take a look at game output quality before picking up this display especially if they are planning to play a lot on the MW. We expect the noise to be fairly bad with the TV Tuner because cable signals are inherently noisy and we would recommend against watching TV on full screen mode.

The Various PIP Modes

PIP is the most useful feature we found for watching content off the other inputs. Here are screenshots of all the different sizes for PIP that are possible.

The only shortfall with PIP is the inability to position the window especially in the first two modes. Hopefully this functionality will be added in a future revision of the M line.