Ok I was going to write a long story about how I got here but who really cares.

The bottom line is this unit completely rocks. I compared it to the Sony SXRDs and the JVC 1080P ILAs – both are 1080P displays but will not accept a 1080P signal. The picture is incredible – truely like an 8 megapixel photo in HD. Even Home Theater Mag rated its performace (96) higher than the Sony (94), JVC (92) and all the DLP (< 90) units in its 2/2006 HDTV face off. But remember its a monitor not a TV so you’ll need to either have a cable box, sat receiver, computer or external tuner. Actually this is one monitor which you can hook everything up to since it has 5 HD inputs. I’ve only found one weakness – sometimes when switching between sources it sometimes looses sinc and goes pink – but its easily fixed by switching again to another source and back.

I have had the chance to test out the 37inch westinghouse, 37 Sceptre, 42inch Sceptre and the 42

westinghouse. I bought all these 1080p monitors and kept only 2 of them. Hopefully my experience will help someone to make a right decision about their future purchase..

First I got the 37 westinghouse.

It was great as a monitor but while watching video it had motion blur due to slower response time

and you could see the video had noise and was not sharp or cleaned up. If you want to buy for monitor only and not to watch video then you can get this unit.

Then I got the 37 spectre

which is also 1080p. This was a very good monitor. Black levels were good but it had video tear

or jitter when I used to watch video with DVI input i.e from the computer.(no it was not the

computer problem) I connected it to 3 different high end computers and the problem still

persisted. I had to return it as it developed problem on left hand side of screen where the there

was a chunk screen started to flicker within a few days. I got an replacement for it after 3 weeks. It worked for 45 days and it developed a blue vertical line which stayed on permanently. When I called

sceptre they wanted me to ship it back and they said it would take 4-6 weeks to fix it, they said it was an panel problem. So I dont know if I was unlucky or if the build quality is bad. But the video from HDTV cable box was very

very nice. Sharp no motion blur no jitter. Jitter was happenning only with 1080p video source

through DVI. What I am talking about is that when watching video the top half of screen seems to tear from bottom half which gets very annoying.

Then I recently bought the 42 inch Sceptre, it had a long wait time. I was really looking forward

to this TV. But I was dissappointed as soon as I turned it on. The black levels were bad. I mean

really bad. There was no details in the shadow. I tried every setting availiable to get the black

level right, it just would not give me a clean picture. When I connect the computer through the DVI

to HDMI convertor, it works good as a monitor. No jitters in the video at 1080p, but the black

level will disappoint.

Then I recently got the 42 westinghouse. This has been the best of both

worlds. The 1080P video from computer is cleaner, no jittering, black levels are pretty good and

best of all you can see details in the shadow. I have had the chance to set all three monitors next

to each other and play the same HDTV content, the 42 westinghouse looks the best then comes the

37 sceptre. The 42 westinghouse has one problem, you will notice interlacing lines. If there is a

diagonal line you will see jagged edges. Especially moving mouths you will see interlace lines.

Its more noticable if you sit closer. This does not happen with the sceptre. The same diagonal

line looked very smooth in sceptre. I think it is something to do with the deinterlacing part of

the 42 westinghouse TV. Sometimes it works sometimes it does not. The video is very crisp, colors are vibrant. Video has less noise.

If you are on a budget get 37 sceptre rather than 37 westinghouse, but you may have quality

issues with 37 sceptre. I saw video jitter for DVI on both 37 sceptre I have had so it has to be a problem with the TV itself. But it is great as a HDTV, very very detailed and colors are really good and it has no deinterlacing or any other problems. details in shadow and the black level is much better on 37 sceptre than the 42 sceptre. Another very annoying problem with the 42 sceptre was when I changed source from DVI to any other source and then immediately back to DVI it would say No signal. Even if you turn the TV off and turn it on it would say no signal. You have to restart the computer. So 42 sceptre could not be used as an computer monitor without having to restart the computer everytime you turn off the TV or change source.

I needed 2 monitors, one 37inch and one 42 inch, I ended up getting two of the 42 Westinghouse. Hope fully this helps.

I received a Westinghouse LVM-42W2 on February 23rd and was instantly amazed by the size and image quality. I use it exclusively as a computer monitor and I was blown away, not only by the beautiful graphics, but also by the high resolution (1920 by 1080 is a lot of pixels!) The colors are vibrant and my movies look fantastic (although you become much more aware of the visual defects of lower resolutions movies and DVDs.) Although I do not use most of the connectors, there is an ample supply of them for all types of video equipment from video game consoles to satellite TV.

I was also initially pleased by the user interface. I used to have a 37″ Olevia 537 (which is a 720p set) which took about 15 seconds to turn on. You would press the power button and get absolutely no feedback (the screen stayed completely black) for fifteen seconds. In addition, my PC would “forget” the resolution after each reboot. With the Westinghouse LVM-42W2, all these little annoyances were swept away. It takes about 4 seconds after I hit the power button for the screen to come alive, and there is an immediate, tv-like beep when you hit the power button, to let you know that it’s coming up. The menus were also very clean, making use of the high resolution of the screen to present clean and crisp menu options. The image quality is absolutely superior to the Olevia panel.

Switching between the different inputs is a snap. The remote control has five buttons, labeled DVI, VGA, YPbPr, S-Video and AV, which allows you to instantly switch between the various inputs. Strangely, pressing the DVI button repeatedly cycles through the two DVI inputs and the single HDMI input. I imagine that the YPbPr does the same for the two component inputs.

It bears emphasizing that this is a 1080p set which accepts 1080p inputs. I have noticed many “1080p” (from Sony, no less!) who do not actually accept 1080p inputs, but instead will upscale a 720p or lower resolution to 1080p (what’s the point!?)

However, having owned it for only a couple of weeks, I have already found serious drawbacks.

I was browsing today to see if there would be any problems with the PS3, and lo and behold, this turns out to be the famous set which does not play well with the PS3. Popular Mechanics did a couple of articles on it [...] Although Westinghouse initially made some encouraging noises about possible firmware fixes, they and Sony have now decided to blame each other and not fix the problem. At this time, it is not clear that there is any good way of connecting a PS3 to this set and get 1080p graphics. One suggestion has been to connect via an HDMI to DVI adapter and into the TV’s DVI2 port. However, there are reports that this does not solve the problem.

Which brings me to the second issue. This HD monitor does accept 1080p input on some, but not all of its ports. I can confirm that 1080p works on VGA and DVI2, but I had a real scare when I hooked my computer to the DVI1 input and the display went bonkers. The manual and spec sheet have conflicting information on this, but it does appear that one of the DVI ports is only able to accept 1080i input (when I turned down my PC’s refresh rate to 30hz on DVI1, it started “sort of working”.) I have not tried the HDMI port, because I do not have an HDMI capable video card. Rumour is that 1080p is not possible on the component inputs, and that the only way to get 1080p from your XBox 360 is to get a VGA adapter for your console, although I cannot confirm any of this.

A third issue was that it took several tries for my PC to go into the proper video mode on the VGA port. The first time I tried to switch it to 1080p, the whole screen when kaplooey. I had to reboot and connect to my old 19″ monitor to set the video mode to something more reasonable. Eventually it came up in 1370×768 (aka 720p). I then had to open my Catalyst Control Center (I have a Radeon card) and manually set the resolution to 1920×1080 and simultaneously set the refresh rate to 60hz. For some reason, the monitor tells the PC it can handle 75hz, but if the PC tries to do 1920×1080 at 75hz, it scrambles everything. So you have to force it to do the right thing.

Fourth issue. I ran it like this for a week (it was beautiful!) but I also ordered a DVI cable (note: this monitor does not come with any cables, not even VGA!) Once the DVI cable arrived, I initially hooked it up and got the scare on DVI1 I talked about above. Then I hooked it up to DVI2 and got a much more reasonable picture, but there was still a glitch. The whole screen appeared shifted to the left, and there was a weird band of black on the right (about an inch.) When I cycled through the inputs and returned to DVI2, the band of black was now a band of crazy colors. There was also about an inch on the right where the last pixel on each row was stretched out so that it was one inch wide.