Product Reviews

Because of the saturated TV market, the price of LCD TVs is plummeting. Costing just £699, Evesham's V32EMRO is one of the cheapest 32" displays that we've seen. Unfortunately, it's also one of the ugliest, with an uneven bezel that gives the impression that the screen is smaller than it actually is.

As with Rock's HD TV (reviewed in What's New, Shopper August 2006), there's only an analogue TV tuner. It produced a reasonable picture from our aerial, but aliasing was noticeable around objects and people onscreen.

We experienced the same kinds of problems when using a DVD player connected via the component inputs. Aliasing was a big problem, particularly at the start of Spider-Man 2, where the intro credits have lots of diagonal black lines flying across the screen. There was also a lot of noise in expanses of sky and other areas of uniform colour. The V32EMRO has no noise-reduction option, so it's hard to compensate

ADVERTISEMENT

for these errors.

Most of the video we watch is delivered in an interlaced format, so we also ran the V32EMRO through a battery of tests designed to reveal the quality of its video-signal processing. It didn't do well, with an overall benchmark score of 48 out of a possible 130. Lack of noise reduction and problems with aliasing let it down considerably.

To see if the problems were limited to inputs that have to be upscaled to match the TV's native 1,366x768 resolution, we plugged in our PC using the HDMI input. The picture was noticeably better using our standard display tests. The greyscale test had only minor banding, although there were some transition problems with the green part of our colour test.

The big problem was with our test pattern of alternating squares of horizontal and vertical lines, which wasn't displayed clearly. We had the same problem with Rock's HD TV. If we had been using an analogue connection, this would have signified incorrect clock and phase settings; with a digital connection, however, you can't adjust these settings. Finally, we tested an HD video. While there were no obvious aliasing problems, we noticed a lot of noise, just as with our DVD player.

The stereo speakers will do the job if you're just watching TV. If you want to watch films, though, a surround-sound system will make more sense.

Evesham's V32EMRO is fairly cheap, but we encountered several problems with the picture. We'd recommend Samsung's 26" LE26R51BD, which costs £200 less.