I have the luxury of working in a business that gets a steady flow of top of the line TVs. And when a TV of the sparkling quality of the Mitsubishi WD-62525 DLP HDTV makes it's way into the office, the drooling begins. Luckily, I got to spend quite a bit of time with this unit and I was duly impressed.

•• Hardware ••
The TV is finished in a dark grey plastic with a black area surrounding the actual screen. There isn't a tremendous amount of real estate being wasted here, with the speakers housed below instead of on the sides. This is good since the screen has a diagonal measurement of 62 inches. This is a big, heavy beast weighing in at about 150 lbs.

The remote is a large universal type that supports many different types of devices. The remote is nothing to write home about, although the backlight capability is handy and easily accessible. I had no problem programming the remote to use all of the devices I had.

•• Features ••
The first thing I want to mention because it is very cool, is the amount of connections this baby has. We have 2 RF connectors that support HDTV, 3 component video inputs, An HDMI and 15 pin VGA port for connecting a computer, 2 firewire ports, 2 s-video and 2 composite. This thing has more inputs than I need and is nicely expandable.

The Mitsubishi WD-62525 DLP HDTV is a 62 inch DLP HDTV. If you don't know what DLP is, it is a technology created by Texas Instruments that uses microscopic mirrors to reflect light onto the display in the three colors of red, blue, and green. It is different from Plasma and LCD and has a resolution of 1280x720 which is the resolution of 720p HDTV. It would be nice if a TV of this size supported 1080i natively, but that's a little far into the future and several thousand dollars more. For those who hook up devices at that resolution the TV will scale down the image. It should be noted that the DLP technology uses a lamp which is rated for 6000 hours. After that, you'll need to buy a new one for a few hundred bucks. If this is a concern, keep in mind that 6000 hours is over 4 years if you use the TV for 4 hours every night.

The TV is digital cable ready with a built-in HDTV tuner. It supports Picture-in-picture and Picture-outside-picture (the screen is split into 2 regions of equal size display).

•• Picture ••
The Mitsubishi WD-62525 DLP HDTV is a fantastic performer in all areas. This is by far, one of the finest looking TVs I've had the privilege of using. After adjusting the colors using he Perfect Color menu, I was able to get a near flawless color picture. There was very little over-bearing red and the other colors resolved beautifully.

It should be noted that the sharpness feature of HDTVs should be turned off since the picture is already sharp by definition. Having the sharpness turned to anything but off adds artificial edge enhancement, which can add unnatural noise to the picture. Why this setting is included in HDTVs is a mystery to me.

One of the benefits of DLP technology is better black production. While LCDs tend to look dark grey, the Mitsubishi WD-62525 DLP HDTV looks nearly perfect black. The opening scenes of Star Wars shows space that is black with bright stars, exactly the way the scene was supposed to look. The early scenes of the Matrix also looked excellent in terms of having black mixed with low level lighting and a few flashes of bright light. I've seen weird gradations in these scenes on LCD TVs, but not with this set. It looked better than I've seen it in a long time.

For me, the ultimate test of quality is the hi-res performance of the Xbox 360. Since most video content including DVDs and HD is compressed, it's often hard to distinguish the quality of the DVD from the quality of the compression. With the Xbox 360, nothing is compressed so any problems with the picture quality are going to be due to the TV. This is a bit of a generalization since different games have different qualities, but for the most part, hi-res games offer an excellent benchmark.

The first game I use is Kameo: Elements of Power. With a wonderfully diverse color palette and vibrant animations, the opening scene is a joy to behold. Combine the rich colors with a large screen and you've got an amazing gameplay experience. The picture is sharp and clear with no edge distortion. The color is even throughout with no hotspots that can sometimes appear on cheaper HDTVs. All in all, the picture was fantastic.

HD content as well looked good, but going from video games to compressed HD content is a bit of a letdown. However the picture from our Comcast feed was excellent and provided a sharp, colorful picture with no red creep and accurate fleshtones. I didn't need to use the different color settings, but there are three for those who have different environmental lighting conditions.

•• Sound ••
I really hate reviewing the sound portions of HDTVs because 99.99% of HD users turn off the speakers and use a home theater system. This is true of the Mitsubishi WD-62525 DLP HDTV as well. On that note, the set does have audio outputs for funnelling sound from the TV into your receiver if you choose that route in case your TV tuner doesn't have that capability (for some odd reason). Regardless, the speakers are suboptimal compared to a home theater, but pretty good compared to other on-board speakers. I couldn't crank the sound up too far before hearing distortions in the bass, but when at a decent level, the bass was fair. The mid-ranges were decent and the highs OK, if a little shrill.

•• Conclusion ••
This is one of the best HDTVs I've had the pleasure of experiencing and I can't wait for DLP to be more widespread. This kind of competition will force the other technologies to improve and the consumer will benefit, especially if the results are as good as this TV.

Recommended: Yes