1 Great value large screen LCD TV - LTV-32W1
I spent several days looking at as many large screen TV's as I could find, mainly around the 25" - 40" size. I have had a Samsung 17" HDTV in the kitchen for some months and have a projector for watching movies, but wanted a good sized TV for the familly room. It was almost by chance that I came across the Westinghouse range of LCD TVs at Best Buy. Prices ranged from $1000 for 27" to $1700+ for 32". The range appears to have been introduced quite recently (early 2005?) and the clean, simple design was immediately appealing. The prices were all very keen - in most cases at least $2-300 less than comparable models from other manufacturers. The only manufacturer with noticeably better picture quality was Sharp. Their picture quality is superb!
My main requirement was for a good looking TV with the best possible picture quality for the price. I wasn't really interested in gimmicks like PIP (picture-in-picture / watching two video sources at the same time), and being able to feed in signals from multiple digital sources. (This model does support PIP as it happens, and also has a wide range of audio & video inputs, but it has only a single TV tuner) I DID want support for HDTV and connection to a PC.
I thought that the 27" model was outstanding value at just under $1000 from Best Buy, but the 32" LTV-32W1 struck me as much better value for $1400 from Electronics Express through Amazon. The picture quality is really good. I have seen many cheap flat-screen TV's that are just so fatiguing to watch. So far I have seen no strange blocky artifacts or other picture distortion. Personally, I found good quality LCD screens so much easier to watch than their plasma counterparts. The picture from LCDs seems clearer and less harsh than plasma. The internal cable-ready tuner is fine for basic low-res TV without the need for an additional cable box. One last point is that I was quite pleased with the sound from the built-in speakers. No, they are not hi-fi, but many of the models I auditionned sounded like tiny transistor radios from the 1970's!! The LTV-32W1
has - in my opinion - one the the better sound outputs from its built-in speakers, which was quite important for me as I did not want any more clutter and wires! I will probably add a small sub-woofer though to fill out the bottom-end.
All-in-all I am very pleased with this TV and would recommend it very highly.
