A couple of months ago I decided it was time to buy a large screen television. I have purchased large screen TV's in the past but each time returned it due to initial dissatisfaction.

My main requirements for the TV were: it should cost no more than around 300 GBP, include native 1080p, hdmi, VGA and manufactured by a known brand. This television seemed to tick the boxes so I ordered it off the internet.

Upon removing the television from the box, I was satisfied with the build quality and design. On one hand this TV is not exactly your state of the art Loewe Spheros but neither is it as bad as an unbranded LCD. The design is very good, just the bezel and housing of the TV could have been slightly better quality but for 300 GBP one can't complain.

Switching on the TV, the television provides a very good image. Connecting the TV to a PS3 via hdmi at native 1080 standard DVD playback is extremely good, the TV also has 100hz so films looks smoother. Tested the TV with HD content and again it doesn't disappoint.

Since I use the PS3 for all media playback I haven't tested the scart input or any other devices. The PS3 does all the hard work in scaling to the television's 1080p input so why bother with anything else. The results may not be so optimal just plugging in a standard DVD player. Connecting the PC via the hdmi input and the DVD playback was quite poor, however this was probably the fault of the PC.

Finally I tested out freeview. I don't watch TV but thought I would check it out. The results were sub standard but again this is mostly due to the low bitrate of freeview. A freeview stream tends to be around 2mbps. On the other hand a DVD that has been encoded properly has a bit rate of around 8mbps.

If you are looking for a budget TV of reasonable quality that doesn't look like it came from the Argos catalogue, you cannot go wrong with this.