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Vizio LED TV gives superb value, features, picture

A Vizio in your living room might not have impressed your snobby videophile friends in the past, but the company known for budget LCDs is doing its best to change that. The XVT3SV series, Vizio's third attempt at using a full array of local dimming LEDs to compete with the other brands' flagship LCDs, is in our book its most successful. The XVT3 stands among the best LCDs we've tested in the crucial areas of black level and color, and its matte screen--rare among high-end LEDs today--means superior bright-room performance compared with just about anything available.

It's … Read more

Vizio touts strong TV sales, but Samsung still leads

Vizio might not be the top U.S. television maker anymore, but the company is attempting to make it clear to everyone that it has its sights set on the top spot.

The TV maker released a statement on Thursday outlining its sales success during the second quarter. The company said that its ability to deliver high-quality offerings at "affordable prices" helped it enjoy the highest quarter-over-quarter growth in the industry.

Of course, what Vizio failed to point out in its statement, which it based on an iSuppli report released on Wednesday, is that the company is still … Read more

Vizio intros 3 budget Blu-ray players with Wi-Fi

Along with new HDTV details, Vizio also announced three new Blu-ray players on Tuesday, all of which support the Vizio Apps platform that we first tested on the Vizio VBR200W. The company's new release is scarce on details, but the VBR210, VBR220, and VBR231 will all have built-in Wi-Fi and a suite of streaming-media features that includes Vudu, Netflix, and Pandora. The VBR210 and VBR220 both have onboard decoding for Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio, and are available now for $190 list price. The VBR231 is coming a little later in July for $200, and, according to Vizio, … Read more

Vizio shows 2010 3D TVs, first passive model for 2011

Vizio announced its 2010 3D TVs at CES in January, and on Tuesday provided a few more details on the upcoming sets. It also showed the first 3D model for the U.S. market to offer passive glasses technology.

Although the January announcement included pricing, Vizio now says all three 3D TV models, which range from 42 to 55 inches, are "price $TBD."

As is common with the company, other details have changed as well: there's no 72-inch screen size anymore; the release date has been pushed back from "August" to "Q4" of … Read more

Samsung takes top spot in LCD TV market

Boosted by growing consumer demand for advanced TVs, Samsung carved out a leading share of the U.S. LCD TV market in the first quarter, according to data released Monday by iSuppli.

For the quarter, the South Korean company shipped 1.1 million LCD TVs. Though that number was down 33 percent from the fourth quarter, Samsung still beat out the overall industry, which saw its shipments drop by 35.8 percent. This difference helped Samsung inch its market share up to 18 percent from 17.3 percent in the previous quarter.

The overall decline in LCD TV shipments is … Read more

Vizio's VBR200W Blu-ray player has Wi-Fi, Netflix; costs less than $200

Vizio is a company best known for offering bargain-price HDTVs that perform better than you'd expect, so we weren't surprised to find that the company's VBR200W Blu-ray player fits the same mold. It's one of the cheapest players ($190 street price) we've seen that has built-in Wi-Fi, which makes it much easier to access its suite of streaming media apps, which includes Netflix, Vudu, and Pandora.

However, it appears that Vizio made some sacrifices to hit the lower price point. The VBR200W has the slowest disc-loading speeds of any standalone player we've tested this … Read more

App-etite for comparison: Internet services on TVs

What a difference a year makes. In 2009, which saw the first serious attempts at TVs with built-in Internet services, we reviewed plenty of mixed bags. On the plus side, essential streaming video services like Netflix and Vudu seemed to work relatively well, but on the minus side, utility widgets (mainly powered by Yahoo) were sluggish, remotes were unwieldy, Wi-Fi was nonexistent, and content selections were limited. In 2010, most if not all of those problems have been addressed by many makers.

This 2010 comparison looks at the major manufacturers' Internet-enabled TV platforms, arranged in order of which ones we … Read more

Vizio's App-tastic TV bests Web-enabled rivals

If you were one of the billions of people who watched the Super Bowl, you may have seen an ad for a certain TV company called Vizio promoting a TV that connects to the Internet to offer Facebook, Rhapsody, Netflix, and a host of other dot-com-style names. That TV is the 2XVT series, first announced more than a year ago, and to judge from our experience with those Internet services--conveniently called Apps--Vizio spent all that time getting the experience of getting the Web onto a TV right.

The Apps response times were quick, Vizio's App interface is well-designed and … Read more