GOOD:
Picture quality is very good - vibrant, detailed and with little of the "gauze" I've seen on other brands' LCD displays in stores (that means YOU, Sony Bravia!)
BAD:
The whole software design is seriously amateurish. The first thing I noticed was that the TV's CPU obviously is a refugee from a Commodore 64 - every action on the remote, no matter what it is, doesn't get a response from the TV until after a very noticeable "lag". This makes navigating setup menus a very hit-and-miss affair; your button press takes a while to be recognised by the TV, and of course your instinct is then to hit the button again as you think the TV didn't see the command. Then suddenly both presses register in milliseconds, placing you elsewhere on the menu from where you wanted to go. This is also a serious pain when paging up and down through the channel list. It's not helped by the fact that the remote has a very, very limited angle of operation.
Teletext is hilarious. And not in a funny way. Probably because of the slow CPU in the TV, each teletext page literally *draws* onto the screen as though it's coming down a 2400 baud dial-up modem connection. Compare that with pretty much every no-name STB and PVR on the market and you've got to wonder what the hell NEC was thinking. The teletext keys for page hold etc etc are all there under a cover on the remote - and they DO NOT WORK! This makes reading Austext's multi-page news stories next to impossible.
The remote itself is obscurity central. Looking for a "swap" button to bounce between two channels? Good luck. It IS there, but NEC has given it the name "Q. View". Huh? Similarly, we have obscure acronyms for basic setup functions - like CSM (colour balance), PSM (picture mode), SSM (audio settings) and AVL (dynamic range limiting).
PIP is so limited in terms of which sources it works with that it's effectively useless.
The now/next info works okay, but pull up extended info and you'll be greeted with text in what looks like the good old Courier monospaced font (it looks cheap!) laid out so poorly that words are split between lines and many lines start off with blank spaces.
Sound quality from the inbuilt speakers is *shocking*. It sounds like a cheap AM radio. The sound setup options have a "graphic EQ" for the inbuilt audio - 5 bands, from 100Hz (as if THOSE speakers can handle 100Hz!) to 10KHz. There is no adjustability for frequencies above 10KHz, probably because the speakers aren't capable of reproducing high frequencies at all. This is shameful in a HD digital set.
Picture quality on the component inputs (from a Sony DVD player) was terrible - grainy, washed-out and blocky. I do wonder if the scaling in this set is to blame for both this and the quality issues on HD.
The owners reported that despite setting the TV's clock correctly and setting the DST option to "on" and getting the correct time as a result, the time would reset itself to an hour earlier at random intervals. Setting the TV to pull the time from the on-air signal initially resulted in an incorrect, non-DST time (the DST setting isn't available in this mode) but it rectified itself sometime later.
But finally, the worst of all: the digital tuner itself seems sensitive enough, but the set's owners called me tonight to tell me that no less than four times today while watching channel 9, the image froze on the screen, the sound cut out, and the TV locked up. The only way to restore it to operation was to turn it off at the power point and "reboot" it.
All in all, unimpressive, and extremely worrying with that "freeze" bug. I've recommended to them that they might want to think about returning it and exchanging it for something else, perhaps the Panasonic 32" with integrated HD tuner. They were all set on getting a Sony Bravia, incidentally, until the lack of digital tuner was pointed out. Pity. I'm very impressed with general image quality (and particularly black levels) on the Bravia screens.
