Rich,
the company had a local TV repairman install the Mighty Shield for me. He popped off the speaker cover, undid the screws over the projector tube cover, and disconnected two wires connectors that hold the display screen. The main frame for the screen lifts off off two brackets on the sides. Eight more screws on two L-brackets hold the top of the frame to the rest. The frame has two channels, one for the cover and one for the display screen. You pull the top off and slide the old screen cover out, then slide the new one in. Reverse for assembly.
The screen was pre-cut to size, so it depends on how good you are on DIY as to whether you should just buy a sheet and cut it.
The longest part of the process was peeling the protective paper off the acrylic (the non-glare side is very adhesive-friendly). Use some cotton gloves when handling the acrylic, as it will show fingerprints very well. Use a lint-free cloth, not a paper towel, with Windex if you need to clean spots. Paper towel residue will show in your picture (according to the repair guy). He was inside the house all of 20 minutes.
The picture was slighly softer and had a little less contrast than before. I spent about 10 minutes with one of the THX optimizer disks getting it lined back out. I spent another 10 minutes running a full convergence alignment.
That same afternoon (daylight throught the movie), I ran the most recent version of Resident Evil (the HD-mastered edition, not the Superbit version) on DVD with component video cables. The movie is notorious for tiny computer read-outs on the sides of the TV (where it has the most trouble with accurate focusing). I could easily read every print-out I had been able to before. There were some parts of the film with very low changes in contrast that appeared somewhat grainy. The window shades were slightly closed but there no glare at all.
I also turned on my chandolier in a perfectly dark room (you can see it hanging in the glarey picture). Nine bulbs 40 watts each made a small highlight in the screen with no picture, but no distracting objects. By the way, the windows you see in the picture are just under forty feet away from the screen, so it's not like there was a blazing sun parked just behind the sofa. There is a length-wise pool table and dining room between the back of the sofa and the windows. And there is a 16 foot porch over the windows themselves.
The next day I watched the Moody Blues DVD from the Royal Albert Hall and Streets of Fire, a movie from the early 80's. These two have alot of low-contrast lighting (Streets of Fire is shot mostly in the dark and is showing its age while the Moody Blues has alot of concert lighting that no doubt affected the initial focus as well) showed a very slight amount of graineyness as the afternoon turned to darkness at a viewing distance of about 8 feet. About two feet further back, the graineyness completely disappeared.
It seemed to take a day or two for the display screen to settle back into the tracks. I have since watched Pitch Black and a couple of broadcast HDTV PBS specials with no problems at all.
In normal contrast conditions, the movies were as good or better than with the older glare screen in place. I would say the TV faithfully reproduces a quality picture (as in the fairly-recent Pitch Black), but does nothing to hide the defects in a poorer quality signal, which is more noticeable in a darker room. Now that the screen has had a chance to settle, I'l run another convergence alignment and see if anything improves.
The older screen appears to be about an eighth of an inch thick, and the newer screen about a tenth. The newer screen cover has a little bit more flexibility and might actually better stand up to smaller impacts than the older screen cover, as far as the cover breaking. It might be a little less protective of the display screen, but there is about an inch between the screen cover and the display screen and I was really surprised how flexible the display itself was.
Is it as good as my Sony 42 inch Grand Wega rear-projection LCD (the one fed with an up-converting DVD player using an HDMI feed) ? No. Is it as good as the Mitsu was originally ? I would have to say yes.
Now the big question... Is it as good in the DAYTIME as the old Mitsu ? Let's just say football season can't get here fast enough !!!
Update: did a second convergence alignment. pretty minor, but the display screen did settle some. Watched the Fifth Element. No sign of any graineyness, even in a fully dark room. I'm very satisfied with the final results.
