ThinkPad X200 Tablet Save Extra 5%
- Average user rating:
- My rating: 0 stars
Full user review
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1.5 stars
"Great idea, nice graphics but poor TV and media adapter"
Pros: Network connectivity
Cons: Bad image qualoty, limited to WMP11 and poor online options
Summary: Brought this TV out of curousity and have now returned it. It's price had dropped $500 and Best Buy had extra discounts on this so I thought I'd try it.
Most users will not be pleased with the out of the box experience this TV gives. While connecting it to your video sources and setting up the channels is the same as most other TVs, the network sharing side will only be easy if you rely on WMP11 for all your media at the present time. iTunes fans, stay away!
The TV found all the stations on my digital cable without trouble. Obvioulsy the encrypted channels weren't there as there is no cable card slot. However I don't see this as a negative as the whole cable card thing is full of incompatible in the first place and my local cable company now refuses to issue them unless you push extremely hard.
The enclosure and industrial design of this TV is very nice in my opinion. The remote was simply laid out and a pleasure to use. However the audio and video quality of this TV are very sub-par for the 42 inch market. Frankly speaking I was very shocked that HP would even dare market this as having any video enhancement or improvement technology. It truely shows that PC companies simple don't get it.
The LCD viewing angle is limited and you quickly notice contrast and color shifting at about 40-50 degrees off of staight on horizontally. The black detail is squashed and no amount of tuning could really correct this. The colors look very unrealistic and mostly faces look too redish or washed out. Grass and trees have nasty lime colors. Who ever came up with the processing settings in this TV seems to have no understanding of video tuning. Also the simple brightness, contrast, hue, satuation menus stop the user from really being able to do anything about it. I believe there is some kind of adaptive contrast or color processing going on in the background and I would have really liked to turn it off.
Simple things like grey scale look aweful on the TV and there is color sneaking in which points to a lack of calibration by HP. Noise is a big issue, both analog and MPEG related. Compared to my other LCD TVs from Sony Samsung and Sharp this TV clearly shows blocking and produces a horible colored speckle pattern on material with noise, e.g. analog cable or MPEG material with noise. Also for teh first time on any of my TVs or PC monitors my digital photos had obvious compression artifacts.
The sound is very hollow and seems to be trapped inside the TV. The virtualizer seems to do very little or at least I haven't yet found the sweet spot.
Anyhow, I brought this TV for network connectivity and was very disappointed at the steps I had to go to in order to view my contect which is stored on a NAS. All the content I was trying to play is unprotected but not in the WMA or WMV format due to my reliance on iTunes and other PVR systems. In order to view this material you either need a DLNA based NAS or leave your PC on. If you have network shares rather than having the media on the PC you will be faced with doing registry changes (see micrsoft WMP help pages). If you want to play unprotected mp4 files you need to do severe registry changes. Thankfully I found some good resources on the web to get this done and now I was able to view the content in WMP library so that I could set it up.
This is all simpler with the other media adapters I have in my home beacuse they work much more easily in a folder browsing mode. Apple TV obvioulsy works very well with iTunes but I have adapters from Netgear, Buffalo, and Hauppauge which I all think do a better job. Their playback is also faster, smoother and has better skip / jump ahead features.
The web features of this TV rely on a HP website and so you're limited and governed by HP on this. Maybe there will be hacks to allow more in the future but for now I don't see this as good feature implementation.
After 2 weeks of playing I return this set and brought a 42" Vizio + Netgear media adapter for the same price. While the Vizio screen brigtness isn't as punchy as the HP but the image quality is significantly better and the overall user experience much higher in my opinion. HP has the right idea about this TV but they really need to focus on making it a better product. I would suggest anyone interested in this TV buy it on a trial basis. Make sure you can return it in case you don't like it. Hopefully HP will improve it in the future with firmware updates.
