Dell W5001C Review
Date reviewed: February 18, 2006
Delivery
The Dell W5001C ships via "specialy carriers" who will differ according to where you live. Where I live, they used a carrier called Eagle Express. When I noted on Dell's status page that my TV was being readied for delivery, I contacted Eagle Express and coordinated a date and time for delivery (they probably would've called me, but I couldn't wait). The delivery men (there are two of them) arrived on time and carried in to my house two boxes - one for the plasma itself, and one for the speakers. The boxes were in good shape, so I signed off on delivery and set to work.
Note that there should be two guys who deliver this TV - the Dell rep with whom I spoke confirmed this. Should only one delivery-person arrive, make sure to inform Dell (at least that's what I was told). Also, as with all electronic deliveries, make sure to inspect your boxes before signing the delivery sheet.
Setting Up
Dell's onscreen display (OSD) controls are easy to navigate, and at a basic level you get only color saturation and color tint controls. These make basic color adjustments easier, however if you want to make individual red, green and blue adjustments, those are apparently buried in the service menus, and aren't accessible in the end-user OSD.
There are four setting for color temperature - Natural, Normal, Red, and Blue (which is the default.) I found that the Normal setting produced the best over all color balance to my eyes (and my family's). The W5001C has 4 preset picture settings - Movies (darker), Sports (high contrast), Weak Signal and Multimedia (computer contrast) - and also Personal in which the set will remember the settings for each type of input you have.
While reviewing the calibration options, I came across an option called "ADC Calibration." Make note of this fact - Do NOT Hit the OK Button while the "ADC Calibration" option is selected on the service menu. Apparently, this will recalibrate the W5001C according to whatever is being fed via the HDMI input. In the factory, a proprietary image (provided by Pixelworks) is used. If you do it at home, you may as well kiss the set good-bye. It cannot be undone, and you will likely have to return the set.
Initially, the W5001C looked good, but I had a sense it could look better. To that end, I ran through the basic calibration on the Digital Video Essentials (DVE) DVD ($16.99), dialing down the brightness, and tweaking up the contrast a bit to get better-balanced black levels. I picked up some initial pixel noise in the blacks, which the DVE calibration also took care of. The DVE DVD also comes with a red/green/blue filter for dialing in basic color calibration, and we used it to slightly dial up the W4200HD's saturation setting, though we left the tint setting untouched, since it generally doesn't affect component video inputs, only S-Video and composite inputs.
After doing the calibration, I switched over to my MediaCom HDTV feed and found that the DVE calibration didn't look quite right on content from this feed. This was a result of some combination of differences in the outputs of the MediaCom HDTV set-top box and the Denon DVD player, and the fact that NTSC and HDTV color spaces are slightly different. I ended up dialing the brightness up a bit for watching cable HDTV content. The upshot is that if your satellite feed and DVD need individual calibration settings, you can put them on different component video inputs (or use HDMI if your gear supports it). The downside is that you can't use your receiver to do video switching - but if getting your DVD and HDTV dialed in just right is important (and it should be), then you'll likely need to use the W5001C itself do the video switching.
After making those adjustments, the W5001C looked very good, ably handling the incoming 720p signal and scaling it smoothly to fit in the panel's 1366x768 pixel resolution. Color balance was rich without being oversaturated, and flesh tones looked natural and life-like. When given a 1080i image, the image was breathtaking.
As an additional test, I attached an S-Video cable from the cable set-top box to one of the W5001C's S-Video inputs to gauge its handling of standard-definition video signals. Granted, this is downscaled HDTV source material, but it does arrive to the HDTV at 480i, and the unit's video processor then has to scale it back up. The W5001C again didn't disappoint, with the S-Video input and the component video's input being almost indistinguishable at times.