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Hardware LCD Screens
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Written by admin
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Tuesday, 27 November 2007 |
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Page 2 of 3
Display
Before you buy the Humax you need to be aware that this set is designed primarily as a screen for your spare room/bedroom and in testing we found this to be the case, but this is not necessarily a bad thing as we will discuss in a second.
We used the small digital aerial that we borrowed off our Genius DVB-T review, for all TV tests.
As with most LCD's if you sit within a few metres of the screen you will see all the screens imperfections and the image will look a touch grainy. However you need to be seating around 5 or so metres away to view the screen properly and the screen quality was actually pretty good when watching TV (1680 x 1050 panel resolution helped).
Even though it has a 1000:1 contrast ration and 300 cd/m2 brightness setting, we did find the screen reasonably vibrant and colours were not a bad match to their real life counterparts.
Blacks were not pure but they were not bad either - we have seen worse.
Thanks to the 5ms response time there was hardly any noticeable ghosting, though we did pick up a touch of ghosting when watching football, but this could be down to our small aerial that we used.
Even though it’s a widescreen display, the biggest annoyance lies with its 14:9 ratio when viewing TV channels. This brainwave was developed by the BBC for handling programs sent to TV sets in widescreen format and essentially it gives you Black bars down each side of the screen, this does not happen on every program but its off putting, more so when you get programs with black boarders at the top and bottom of the screen as well - thus resulting in an even smaller picture.
In practical terms this is not as much of a problem, as you are only possible viewing this screen in short bursts, but it’s still not something we would expect to see from a modern widescreen display or one that costs £400.
DVD
Plugging in a DVD player though will use the full width of the screen - when plugged in via a Scart socket.
Once again the quality was acceptable, though it’s low 1000: contrast ratio and 300 cd/m2 comes into play, so a bit more tweaking of the brightness and contrast was in order. But Spiderman (our Test DVD) still looked good.
Console
For consoles you have a variety of cable input options to choose from, though if you own an Xbox 360 or a PS3 you are best to stick with component and HDMI, as the Scart or S-video ports don't produce a very good picture, mainly because you have to sit closer to the screen and you tend to notice its imperfections more.
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 27 November 2007 )
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