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Hitachi 32LD6600
by Screenager1988
Sigh. A cheap LCD tv that I bought back in 2007 without researching for too much money.
What more did I expect?
It wasn't all bad - it still works at least, read more below.
First off this tv is not full HD, it's highest resolution is 720p or 1080i. Note there is a MASSIVE difference between 1080i and ... 1080p I won't bore you with all the statistics but safe to say if your look for a tv, make sure you go for one that has a 1080p screen luckily, being 32 inches your not likely to be sitting close enough to notice the difference.
Secondly the tv's colours are terrible, horrible and washed out - and not vibrant in the slightest, even for a tv from 2007 it's not acceptable. I use the TV mainly for playing PS3 and Xbox on and it looks pretty bad, details are hard to pick out and it's just generally not as pleasant an experience as it should be.
On the other hand the sound is fine for a tv of it's price, there isn't much bass but the mids and treble are catered for here, it sounds ... quite nice actually. It also comes with a headphones port - which might seem like a small touch, but a lot of very expensive tv's just don't have it and for online console gamers like myself it makes life so much easier just to plug in a set of headphones and get going.
The Tv doesn't handle SD content very well, it's very blocky and shows all the signs of an older generation LCD panel. Not nice.
If you can get it for cheap - and I mean cheap £50 at a cash and carry, this might be worth it for a spare room or a kids tv.
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Hitachi L32HP04U
by DavyMichelle
We had been wanting a new living room TV for a while now, and as we haven't got a huge living room, we wanted one that was big but not huge. We decided to look in the 32" to 40" range with this in mind, and were really pleased to stumble across this model in the Argos sale. The full retail price is £369.95 which I think is ... reasonable value for money. Presently it's on offer for £329.99, and when we bought it back in January, it was only £249.99! You can't say fairer than that for a TV of this size and ability.
Getting this TV set up was extremely quick and easy. I got it out of the box, removed the screen protector, attached the stand and plugged it in - job done. The TV has built in freeview, though I didn't need to search for any channels because we're using this with a Sky box. If we wanted to set it up to receive freeview channels, the menu functions allow us to do this easily, and the instructions clearly explain how to do it.
I was initially surprised to find that a TV of this size has only got one scart socket, but I quickly realised why. This TV has obviously been designed in more recent years, as it comes with two HDMI sockets, a VGA port (PC input), AV socket and Component Video Sockets. It occurs to me that while the expectation a few years back would be to plug in lots of scart leads - that's not what we do anymore! We only need one scart socket, for our DVD player, everything else requires the other sockets. Sky HD plugs in through the HDMI sockets, as would a blu-ray player. The Wii is plugged in using the video sockets, though we could use the scart if we preferred. The VGA port is really handy as it means we can plug in our PC if we want to watch anything from the internet as well. There are enough ports on this TV to easily plug in everything we need to, and if we did need more scart sockets, we could probably hook things up through the DVD player or Sky box (as we did with our signal sender), or we could just get a cheap multi-scart adapter.
Switching between our various inputs is nice and easy - we just hit the 'source' button on the remote control, scroll down the list using the arrow buttons, then hit 'OK' to choose what we want to use the TV for (Sky, Wii, PC etc). I love how versatile this TV is, and more importantly, how easy it is to navigate between the various options.
The picture quality is very good, and as this is a HD ready TV, we can view HD pictures that we get from some of our Sky HD channels or the internet. We would also be able to watch Blu-Ray films on here if we wanted to. You can easily see the difference between standard and HD pictures on this TV, with a decent resolution of 1366 x 768 pixels.
I'm really impressed with the sound quality too and have noticed that it's far superior to the other TVs in our house. I've got a Technika TV upstairs and the sound and picture quality are noticeably worse than they are on this TV - and yet I paid only around £70 less (for a 24" screen). I like that this has a built in Nicam sound system which easily fills the room with sound. This is a proper living room TV which is designed to be heard and watched by people sitting in various positions around the room - not just one person sat right in front of it.
As an added perk, the TV looks good sat on display in our lounge. It's got a glossy black frame, a nice square shape to it (this is a standard shape, not widescreen) and a matching glossy stand which supports the unit well. For the price we paid we got an absolute bargain, and even if you're paying in the £300's for this - you will still get value for money. I have to give this TV five stars, I couldn't be happier with it. It's been working brilliantly for over a month now and has made TV time a lot more enjoyable for the family.
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