Received my TV this morning, got pushed back until Monday but the delivery guy said the box was so big he thought he'd delivery it on his day off so Monday is lighter for him, top bloke \o/ Initial reaction was great, really loved it although firstly noticed that the button the front doesn't light up when the machine is on like some Hannspree monitors do... which is a shame as it would have been a nice touch but just a cosmetic issue.
Hope this post helps anyway, if you need more info of what a picture of something on the TV let me know and I'll take another pic - although there are pictures to view at the bottom of this post in case you miss 'em.
I'll list you some notes and specifications of the TV as some of them that I have read are wrong and are a little bit misleading in some cases, so they correct specs with some extra notes, are:
- TV has 0 dead / lazy pixels
- Outer finish is gloss (plastic)
- Dimensions are: 941.6mm x 726.2mm x 294.5mm (H/W/D)
- Viewing angles are 176/176
- Contrast ratio is 1200:1, with 500 cd/m2
- Weight is 28 kg (62~ lb)
- Top of the TV has the control system
- TV does NOT have Freeview - only Analogue (BBC1, BBC2, ITV, C4, C5)
SD / Analogue Tuner
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Decided to then plug it in and have a play. Couldn't initially find the port connections which was a little odd, but noticed that the whole back bottom half of the TV has a large panel over it which you can clip off and it exposes all the connectors. So plugged it in and put the aeriel in, then turned it on and started the auto tuning. Took about 5 minutes to auto tune everything in although it didn't do it properly and my channels ended up as:
1 - bbc1
2 - bbc1
3 - bbc1
4 - itv
5 - five
6 - snow
7 - channel 4
8 - snow
9 - bbc2
So ended up having to spend about 45 minutes getting all the channels right which was a complete nightmare to do. The tuning system itself is very good though and you can fine tune very well with it and "Auto find channel" works well and picks up clear signals most of the time. One thing I did notice when doing all this though is that the remote isn't very good. The buttons reaction time to the TV is seriously slow, sometimes about 2 seconds before it does something. Also the sensor on the remote is terrible and you need to point it directly at the bottom right of the TV to get it to work properly, think a new remote might be in order at some point.
I would like to point out though that Channel 5 no matter how well I fine tuned it had MAJOR ghosting, but none of the other channels did. Even had a laugh with my dad when looking at it as we were watching the Italian football on C5 when testing it and someone took a penalty and it looked like two blokes taking it, it's that bad. This TV is also the 5 basic channels only built it - and does NOT come with Freeview. You could just get a seperate Freeview box however and just use - personally I wasn't bothered as I have a TV card for my computer which is doing the job.
The standard definition image quality was pretty decent for SD, but it could have been nicer and using the built in Analogue Tuner it wasn't top notch, but really for Analogue and the fact I was using an aerial on the roof whilst it was raining outside (causes interference) it done a pretty decent job.
PC + Xbox 360 / VGA Connection
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After tuning I got it upstairs into my media room and took some initial pictures which are later on in the post. Plugged my computer straight into the VGA port on the back of the TV and booted up the machine. Worked straight away with no hassle and just booted up as it would look on a normal monitor. Got into Windows and had to reconfigure the resolution as it was somewhat off. The specifications that I had read on the Internet for this TV was 136
6 x 768 but it's actually 136
0 x 768, not that it makes any difference but just in case some people set it to 1366 x 768 and think it looks a little stretched.
PC image was very good, although I did have to re-run the Nvidia Display Optimisation Wizard again to redo the colours, brightness and contrast as it didn't look great to start with. After I had ran the Wizard however, it looked very clear although it could have done with being slightly more sharp than it is, alas I cannot find an option for sharpness on the TV settings so maybe there isn't one, shame!
Games were a joy to play and I had a quick blast on Crysis, Call of Duty 4 and Team Fortress 2 and all of them looked absolutely fantastic. Never had any tearing or ghosting what-so-ever, since this tv is 8ms response time, and the IQ after some initial tweaking was excellent.
Xbox 360 looked excellent on it as well, just as good as the PC games if not maybe slightly better for some reason. I had the Xbox 360 set to "720p" from the System Settings. Games I tested were Mass Effect, Assassin's Creed and Halo 3 and they looked simply stunning. It played very well, I didn't notice any ghosting or tearing when playing and really it kinda made me want to re-do Mass Effect again
Built-in Speakers
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Built in speakers are not bad really for what they are, and when we were testing the TV downstairs we only used these speakers and they did give off some rather clear sound for being only 10 watt speakers (2x 10, so 20 watts of sound in total). They are attached to the bottom of the TV and from what I could tell are not detachable but they fit well with the TV so they don't stand out much.
HDMI / SCART / Component
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Untested
Pictures
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Technical Specifcations from the manual
Top of TV - control box
Standard Definition - Analogue TV (in darkness)
High Definition - Band of Brothers (720p) (in the dark)
High Definition - Band of Brothers (720p) (in the dark) Angled
Connectors on the back
*
Width of the TV
* Sorry, didn't have a tape measure handy, so used a cig box :/
Got it for next day delivery, so hopefully have it tomorrow although maybe not due to the holiday season. When it comes I'll have a play and let you know what I think of it, and maybe with some pictures.
