Product Reviews

The huge number of LCD TV manufacturers has led to healthy competition and meant that prices have fallen. Rock is the latest company to release a TV, and its 32" model is available for well under £1,000. It's not the most attractive TV we've seen and we're not big fans of its gloss bezel. But it comes with a healthy range of inputs, including three SCART, component, DVI, D-sub and HDMI ports. The speaker bar under the bezel is surprisingly good, producing clear sound. If you find it a little bass heavy, you can remove it and use a pair of speakers.

To see how it performed, we started by connecting it to our aerial socket. The 32" HD TV has an analogue tuner, so you'll need a separate set-top box if you want to watch digital TV. The picture quality was good, but we noticed aliasing, particularly around the outlines of people. The picture also jumped distractingly when

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interference occurred. We then connected our DVD player via the component inputs. The colour reproduction was excellent and the picture was bright. However, aliasing was a big problem, particularly on Spider-Man 2's opening credits, which have a lot of diagonal black bars. The picture was also quite noisy, particularly in mid-contrast areas such as red bricks and grey walls. We've seen better from cheaper TVs.

Most of these problems are due to the TV having to upscale the low-resolution PAL video to match its native resolution of 1,366x768, so we also tested using a PC connected to the TV's DVI input. The results were noticeably better, but not without flaws. The desktop looked bright and colourful, but the text was hard to read and some letters almost merged together. Our test pattern of alternating squares of horizontal and vertical lines wasn't displayed properly; it was as if the TV's clock and phase settings were incorrect. However, as we were using a digital input this couldn't be the case, as you can adjust these settings only when using analogue. Our colour test was much better, displaying near-perfect gradation between colours and excellent colour reproduction. Our greyscale test was almost as good, but significant banding appeared in the darker shades.

Rock's TV has an impressive range of inputs and a decent price, but the picture quality could be better. For basic TV and DVD use, it's acceptable, but you can get better 32" TVs for less