VIZIO E3D470VX Great, bargain 3D TV - Great for the price, Really Good in comparison to what's out there.

VIZIO E3D470VX Great, bargain 3D TV - Great for the price, Really Good in comparison to what's out there.
I bought this TV back in April, so I've had it a little over six months now. It was an upgrade from a 32" HD (non-3D). I chose it because it had a great picture in the store, uses passive glasses, and it was a steal. I have not once regretted my purchase, although there are some flaws. So let's skip the pros for now and get right to the cons:

1) The remote is pretty bad. Lots of little buttons all scrunched up together with no intuitive layout and you have to press them pretty firmly to get a response. I do like that there's a full qwerty keyboard on the flip side of the remote. I don't use it that often, but it's convenient when I need it. A non-essential but very cool gizmo feature. If I were rating the remote by itself, I'd give it 1 star, 2 tops. But I only need that remote occasionally (to access Netflix, for instance.) Otherwise, I just volley between the Comcast universal remote and the PS3 remote. This isn't a dealbreaker, by any means.

2) SD picture is not great for sports (but fine for just about everything else). I get a ton of sports channels that aren't offered in HD yet (at least not on Comcast in my area), and the SD picture on sports with fast action leaves quite a bit to be desired - significant motion blur, indistinct images, poor resolution. Some of it may be the signal coming through these channels in the first place - but not all of it. I've gotten good pictures on these channels from other TVs. To me, this is kind of a biggie because that's what separates the good HDTVs from the great ones - how well they can play NON-HD stations. It would've cost the rating more than one star except that this makes up such a small percentage of my watching - and the rest of my experience has been excellent - that it was only worth knocking off one star for me. For some, though, it might be worth more.

That's really all the bad I can say. Yeah, the sound's not fantastic, but I knew going into it that I'd be buying a sound bar eventually. I still haven't bought that sound bar yet, and the TV's sound is still acceptable. Not great, but you can't expect to shake the house with a TV's built-in speakers. It just doesn't happen. I'm ok with it.

Other than those few things, though, I truly enjoy this purchase.

1) It plays 3D extremely well, both through Bluray on my PS3 as well as through the 3D channels Comcast offers. (Football in 3D still leaves a heckuva lot to be desired, by the way. Woof.) The picture is crystal clear,and the 3D images are just that. 3D. Never had a problem with it - aside from when I picked the wrong setting to watch 3D, and that was user error. You're best off, by the way, letting the TV tell you when it gets a 3D signal, rather than trying to select the 3D signal from the TV's settings before the signal actually comes through. You're liable to get it wrong, but the TV picks the right setting every time. Just let it do its thing.

2) I really like the fact that it uses passive 3D glasses. I have a ton of them lying around, and they all work fine. I've had 8 people watching in 3D at once before, and active shutter glasses would've cost me $500 minimum to allow that (and probably more). I do see a bit of a difference between active and passive (to my eyes, active seems to jump out at you a little more while passive seems to have more depth to it), but personally I like the way the passive looks better. I wasn't super keen on the active sets I looked at and thought they would probably give me a headache after watching them a while. I've never had any issues with watching through these passive glasses.

3) WiFi enabled out of the box. Set up was easy, signal is strong, nary a problem here. One of the instances where the qwerty keyboard was nice, typing in my wpa key.

4) I've played around with a couple of the pre-installed internet applications (and there are lots more you can download), but I've really only dug into Netflix. No problems here either. The only times a show's ever stopped to buffer have been when either Netflix or my Internet connection was having problems (as verified by the fact that the issues followed me to other Netflix-connected devices in the house.) Streaming's been great - no concerns.

5) It seems nearly infinitely adjustable. A ton of settings to tweak to your heart's desire. You may need to play around a little to get the picture just the way YOU want it (because many of the customizations are really for personal preference), but it looked great right out of the box, and my tweaking made minor changes at best. Nevertheless, it's nice to be ABLE to tweak. In fact, the only tweak I really NEEDED to make was turning off the Smooth Motion motion compensation. It created a noticeable "soap opera effect", which was distracting when watching regular shows, and I really only need it, want it, and turn it back on when watching sports.

6) Great price. I got it on special at the time for a little less than $800. Looks like it's about $800 now, so there you go. Still a great price now.

So there you have it. Really great set for the price. Not perfect but perfectly enjoyable. Are there better 3DHDTVs out there? Yeah probably. But would you pay a ton more money for them? Definitely.