| Search AudioEnz | |
| Articles | |
|
Current
reviews |
|
| News | |
| Community | |
| Buying | |
| About AudioEnz | |
About AudioEnz |
Flat, wide and handsome
The Loewe Spheros
by Stephen Ballantyne
October 2001
Loewe Spheros plasma television. $35,000.
Were you fortunate enough to sell your dot com shares before the technology bubble burst? Is your central city restaurant booked solid every night, despite huge prices and patronising staff? Were you born with a silver cutlery service in your mouth?
If your answer to any of these questions is ‘yes’, then Loewe has your telly ready now.
Actually, watching the Loewe Spheros for any length of time suggests that this device somewhat transcends common understanding of what television should be. This is a no-effort spared machine where enormous pains have been taken to attend to details that other manufacturers evidently couldn’t care less about.
Although it’s not the Spheros’s attention to detail that immediately commands notice – rather it’s the huge, perfectly flat 42 inch wide (106 cm diagonal) screen 15cm-deep flat panel display, combining the brilliance of a gas plasma display with the accumulated benefits of Loewe’s years of work on digital TV chassis.
Viewed
from a sofa in a bright day-lit but not sunny room, the floor-standing
Spheros is an imposing, nearly square group of panels: On top, the large
852 by 480 pixel screen with surrounding bezel establishes the basic dimensions
of the unit. Below, a small brushed-chrome rectangle with a round port
allows infrared sensor to peep out from a panel of four concealed speakers;
and below that, a deeper panel conceals a subwoofer.
Electronics for the display are kept apart in a master unit, with a single thick sealed cable connecting the two. Control is by a substantial alloy remote which gives access to a computer-style series of menus, and also comprehensive on-screen help. The Spheros does not need a printed manual.
Loewe says the Spheros uses the P24 variant of its Q2400 top-of-the line chassis; the version available in New Zealand has no fewer than three SCART inputs, along with VGA and even RS232 connectors. The Spheros may be expensive, but it maximizes its value by accommodating as wide a range of connection options as possible.
Picture-in-picture, optional surround speakers, timers parental lock functions – you can pretty well take them all for granted in what is the top model from a manufacturer famous for the high quality of its products.
The minor touch I liked the best (because my TV doesn’t do it, and it bothers me) was the automatic sound levelling – switch channels or signal sources and the Spheros will do its best to hold volume at an even level. In Europe broadcasters include a signal to make this easier, but the Spheros will do it by itself if that signal isn’t available.
Loewe claims the Spheros is the world’s best TV, which is inevitably a subjective evaluation that is likely to be overtaken by technological progress. Nevertheless, I’ve never seen a better one.
Forget
about the pixel count: as a sometime film projectionist, and former film
reviewer I’d rate the quality of the Spheros’s image as better
than most commercial 35mm cinemas, better even than many preview theatrettes
(particularly since the low clatter of projector noise common to most
theatrettes is not part of the Spheros experience.)
The on-screen image from a DVD source is not exactly like film, or ordinary TV, or anything else, however; there’s a barely perceptible sense of – not flicker, but noise, in some areas of smooth tone. I found it no more noticeable than the graininess in a 35mm movie; call it character, rather than anything perjorative.
Naturally, screen geometry is perfect – it is possible to introduce distortion to make square images fit the oblong screen, but it’s entirely a matter of user choice.
Thankfully, the over-crispness I’ve seen in some large LCD-based displays was absent. (My guess is that LCD manufacturers are compensating for trailing effects with moving objects by applying sharpening algorithms – the Spheros instead takes steps to smooth fast moving objects with what Loewe calls Digital Transient Improvement technology, although like just about everything else, this can be turned off by a menu selection.)
You will need a more than average amount of money to pay for this: the basic Spheros wall unit and master unit starts at $35,000 (a year’s pay for many people); the floor standing version, with remotely controlled power-driven swivel is more like $42,000. It is available in Arctic Silver finish, or a glossy lacquer-like black.
It would be foolish to buy such a device without having a suitable room to put it in, along with speakers and input sources to match; all this will take serious money.
Nevertheless Loewe’s local distributor says it is a steady seller, with customers taking pains over installation. At least one has set up the Spheros so that it retracts into the floor when not in use. Could this be Dr Evil’s TV of choice?
Want to comment on this review? Click here for Feedback