On Thursday April 26^th, Casablanca was shown across the country at select theaters using Digital Cinema grade projectors. I was very excited to catch this event at our local Island 16 theater in Holtsville, New York, which is outfitted with Sony's latest 4K SXRD Digital Cinema projector, which is basically a very large 4K resolution LCoS (Liquid Crystal on Silicon) projector. I was expecting a true 4K resolution presentation via a server as my understanding is this film and many others have been archived in the new 4K format. Unfortunately, the source was a 1080p DishNetwork satellite broadcast distributed by Fathom Events.

Pros: Very good calibration features for tweaking and setup. CMS feature works very well to fine tune colors to be very close to the Rec 709 specification. Grayscale and gamma performance are excellent post calibration.

Cons: Off angle viewing is very poor. Black field uniformity is a little splotchy. Cyan tracking below 50% luminance levels skews toward blue similar to the Elite models.

To Buy or Not to Buy: With a street price of well under 3K, and a screen size of 70-inches, this panel has a lot of bang for the buck. A full array LED backlit panel with good black level performance, the LC-70LE735U can be calibrated to a high degree of accuracy, and is capable of producing very good pictures. Hard to beat for the money.

On the odd chance your TV was disabled during the second week of January and you missed the evening news during that half-fortnight, C.E.S. is the Consumer Electronics Show held annually in the city of conspicuous power consumption, Las Vegas, Nevada.

I subscribe to almost every publication targeted at the Home Theatre arena, both on-line and hardcopies. The objective, obviously, is to try to stay current with new developments and maybe spot a trend or two, before the next guy. As I peruse late November material I can't help but spot an annual and apparently immutable trend to offer Christmas gift ideas to Home Theaterites (yes, I'm licensed to make up new words whenever I feel like it).