humax tft lcd tv quotation

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Today is a good day to be my back. Just for once I’ve been able to take a break from hoicking around the sort of monstrously large TVs that seem to be all the rage these days in favour of something you can easily tuck under your arm.

That ‘something’ is the Humax LGB-19DTT: a 19in LCD TV which, despite its smallness and low £240 cost, boasts a built-in digital tuner and HD Ready specification. In other words, it has the potential to be a pretty much perfect option for a kitchen, study, bedroom or child’s room. All that it needs to do to finish the job is perform well.

Considering how affordable it is, the 19DTT is rather good-looking by small TV standards. Its combination of a matt black bezel with a silver outer trim and shiny silver strip running along near the bottom edge resembles the current fashion among large LCD TVs right now, and is certainly a cut above the cheapo grey plastic adorned by many of its rivals. What’s more, if you don’t fancy the black version I tested, the set is also available in white or pink (!) versions at no extra cost.

In keeping with its HD Ready credentials, meanwhile, the 19DTT has got both HDMI and component video inputs – both really impressive discoveries on what’s effectively a portable TV. Plus there’s a PC port so that you can double the screen up as computer monitor, and support for more ‘old-school’ fare in the shape of an RGB SCART, S-Video port and composite video input.

The good first impressions made so far merely grow with the discovery of a claimed 1,000:1 contrast ratio – easily the highest such figure we’ve yet seen from a small TV – and a surprisingly high resolution of 1,440 x 900 pixels.

Needless to say, this resolution means the 19DTT is built in a widescreen configuration rather than the ‘square’ still adopted by many sub-20in TVs – a very sensible move when you’ve got a built-in digital tuner that receives most of its programmes in widescreen.

After first being impressed by the 19DTT’s resolution, though, it suddenly struck me that it may not, after all, be quite so great as it first appears. For if you apply a quick bit of maths to 1,440 x 900, it turns out to deliver a native aspect ratio of 1.6:1 (or 16:10 widescreen) – which falls slightly short of the full 1.78:1 delivered by a true 16:9 widescreen TV or broadcast. Despite this, 16:10 widescreen is quite a common resolution on computer and notebook displays and is largely down to the fact that it’s cheaper to manufacture.

Low and behold, this aspect ratio discrepancy is indeed reflected in the TV’s pictures, as even if you choose the set’s ‘Full’ aspect ratio option, it’s clear that normal widescreen images aren’t quite fitting fully into the screen, with a little of the image missing from the top and bottom edges. It even seemed to my eyes as if a very small distortion was stretching the image vertically. Still, while this initially irritated me, I have to say that by the time I’d finished the testing, I’d already got used to it to the point where I didn’t really notice it any more.

Elsewhere you can adjust such niceties as the backlight level and fleshtone balance, set alarm and snooze timers (reflecting the TV’s potential as a bedroom TV), and even call in an SRS TruSurroundXT pseudo-surround sound circuit! Given the puny sound produced by most small LCD TVs, this latter feature seems insanely optimistic, but hey – professional that I am, I’ll reserve my judgment until I’ve actually listened to it.

Take its black level response, for instance. Practically every small TV I’ve ever seen has suffered more or less dismally with LCD technology’s common problem with greyness over dark areas, yet the 19DTT really does have a fair stab at presenting a really quite believable representation of real black.

We’re not talking anything on a par with Pioneer’s KURO plasma TVs here, obviously; for instance, dark areas do still feel a bit hollow for all their black intensity. But we certainly are talking about suitably convincing black levels that allow you to actually enjoy a predominantly dark film like ”The Da Vinci Code”. Well, maybe ‘enjoy’ is a bit of a strong word for that particular film, but I think you know what I’m getting at.

It has to be said that the difference made by the extra detail and clarity of HD sources is hard to appreciate fully on a screen this small. But considering the TV is so affordable, we guess you might as well have the HD Ready resolution rather than not, right?

Moving on to the 19DTT’s sound, it’s par for the small LCD TV course. Which is to say, pretty useless. Things just about hold together during most ordinary TV viewing, but a film or high-octane drama really put it through the wringer. And as for that pseudo surround mode, forget it. I could discern hardly any difference in the sound whether the mode was active or not. Except that the pseudo surround actually sounded slightly worse than the normal stereo setting.

Perhaps inevitably for £240, the LGB-19DTT can’t escape all of the usual small LCD TV pitfalls. Its sound and brightness certainly fail to impress. Yet its black levels, colours and features roster do set it a notch higher than anything else of a similar size and price we’ve seen to date, so if you’re in the market for a small second-room TV, you’ll struggle to find anything better.

We test every TV we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.

Usually when you’ve got a 32in TV going for just £390, you’re talking about some no-name model you can pick up from the shelves of your local supermarket. But today that paltry sum can bag you the LGB-32DST from Humax, a brand which, while hardly premium, is certainly generally considered to sit at a slightly higher level than the Bushes, Goodmans, Prolines and Fergusons of the AV world. So here’s hoping the 32DST turns out to be as big a bargain as it initially appears.

The 32DST’s connections are a touch disappointing in one sense, as they only include two HDMIs when we like to find three these days. The reality, though, is that the two HDMI situation is pretty much par for the course at the Humax 32DST’s price point. And you do at least get some pretty reasonable accompaniment in the form of the de rigueur component video port, a D-sub PC jack, and a digital audio output – among other things.

On a bigger TV this would be a serious crime. But we guess we can live with it on a 32in TV, where the extra finesse of 1080p/24 is harder to appreciate anyway. It’s also worth considering that had such a budget TV tried handling progressive signals and, especially, 24Hz feeds, it might actually have ended up making a royal mess of things. So perhaps the 32DST’s decision to top out at 1080i playback is merely the action of a TV prepared to accept its limitations.

It’s imperative that we point out here, too, that the 32DST is not a Full HD TV, boasting instead a native resolution of 1,366 x 768 pixels. This is only to be expected of such a cheap set, and obviously makes 1080p/24 compatibility less of an issue as there’s going to have to be image scaling to translate a 1080-line source to the TV’s 768 lines of pixels anyway.

Humax claims a contrast ratio of 1,000:1 for the 32DST – hardly one of the highest around. However, in a move typical of the LCD market, this ‘native’ figure can be boosted (to an unspecified level) by a dynamic backlight arrangement that adjusts the picture’s brightness in accordance with an assessment of the image content. As in, the darker the image content, the lower the backlight output, to improve black level response. You can adjust the backlight to any of three ‘manual’ levels too if you don’t fancy the auto setting – an important touch for reasons we’ll come to later.

The 32DST’s reasonably tidy onscreen menus have one or two surprising tricks up their sleeve given its price. You can, for instance, call up picture-in-picture functions, and adjust the way the set delivers skin tones. Plus there’s a multi-level noise reduction facility, and SRS TruSurround XT to deliver a pseudo surround sound effect using just the TV’s speakers.

Happily the 32DST has more success with its pictures. With HD sources, for instance, the picture is considerably sharper than might be expected given the set’s 1,366 x 768 resolution and lowly price tag. There’s precious little of the general softness and lack of detail that afflicts many cut-price rivals, and even better, there’s nowhere near as much LCD motion blur to contend with as we would have expected.

At this point I’d normally expect to have to bang on about how severely the budget Humax’s picture quality drops off with standard definition. But actually, while there’s certainly a small increase in motion blur, and obviously not as much fine detail in evidence, the picture is nothing like as noisy and indistinct as with some, nay many other (especially budget) LCD TVs we’ve seen.

I also like the way you can watch the 32DST from a really quite acute angle before the contrast and colour response start to drop off to any large extent – we still see some quite expensive TVs still struggle with this problem.

Also, if you use the ‘Auto’ backlight mode that on paper should give you the most effective contrast throughout a film or TV show, the screen sometimes adjusts its brightness so frenetically that the picture almost seems to be flickering.

Does Humax’s LGB-32DST set new standards of picture and sound prowess? Of course not. But does it nonetheless perform markedly better than you might expect of a 32in TV costing south of £400? Definitely.

We test every TV we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.