humax 20.1 tft lcd tv for sale
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.
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Modern TVs are more complicated than ever before. If you’ve found yourself browsing one of our guides and felt stumped by some of the acronyms or tech specs, we’ve summarized the most common terms below:
LCD: LCD stands for liquid crystal display, and it’s the most common kind of television besides OLED (defined below). LCD TVs shine an LED backlight through a panel of liquid crystal, a malleable substance that reacts to electricity, opening or closing when jolted. In LCD TVs, the liquid crystal opens to allow the backlight through or closes to block it. The specific details of the opening/closing are dependent upon the arrangement of the pixels: The most common LCD arrangements are Vertical Alignment (VA) and In-Plane Switching (IPS), with the former tending to produce higher contrast and the latter tending to produce wider viewing angles. All so-called “LED” TVs are really LCD TVs, as are all current QLED and ULED TVs.
OLED: An organic light-emitting diode, or OLED, TV creates light inside each individual pixel without using a backlight and can dim each pixel individually all the way down to black, which LCD TVs can’t do. This tech gives an OLED TV an infinite contrast ratio and other benefits to help create an overall better-looking image, although at considerable additional cost. You can read more about OLED technology in this article.
Mini-LEDs: Every LCD TV made today currently uses LEDs to produce the light that shines through the LCD panel. Most TVs use LED lights that pass through a diffuser to light up the entire LCD screen. Mini-LEDs, which some TVs use, are much smaller than traditional LEDs, so TV makers can install more of them and thus create more zones of local dimming, which means less blooming or halos around bright objects. Mini-LEDs are completely different from micro-LEDs, an available (though very expensive) technology that employs individual red, green, and blue LEDs to produce an image without needing an LCD panel at all.
Nits: Also called candelas per square meter (cd/m²), this unit of luminance measures how much light a TV can produce. Previously, TVs could output 200 to 300 nits, and standard dynamic range (SDR) content was graded and mastered with 100 nits as the standard. With high dynamic range (HDR), content is mastered with 1,000, 4,000, or 10,000 nits as the standard; so, the more nits an HDR TV can display, the more accurately it can display the highlights in HDR material without having to reduce the brightness of the highlights or clip them.
Wide color gamut: Ultra HD content has a wider color gamut than standard HDTV content; right now, most UHD content is mastered with the same DCI/P3 color gamut used in theatrical cinema (the ultimate goal is the even larger Rec. 2020 color gamut). This expanded color gamut allows a TV to display richer reds, blues, and greens than ever before. Some TVs use quantum-dot technology to produce this wider color gamut.
Quantum dots: Quantum dots are a color-enhancing technology primarily found in LCD TVs (though some 2022 OLED TVs now have them as well). Chiefly employed as a filter that’s painted onto a substrate, quantum dots are microscopic nano-crystals that, when struck with blue light, produce very vivid red or green light (depending upon the size of the crystal). Quantum dots are the primary technology that allows LCD TVs to produce the wide color gamut required to display HDR content properly, as they greatly increase the color saturation of red and green.
Refresh rate: All digital displays (including TVs) have what’s called a refresh rate, measured in hertz (Hz), shorthand for cycles per second. A TV’s refresh rate refers to how quickly it displays new incoming video information on a nanosecond-to-nanosecond basis. While there are many possible refresh rates, most TVs come with either a 60 Hz refresh rate (meaning 60 screen refreshes per second) or a 120 Hz refresh rate (120 screen refreshes per second). Ideally, a TV will have the highest refresh rate possible, but there are diminishing returns for higher refresh rates during many types of content. A 120 Hz TV has advantages when watching 24p content or mitigating judder (definitions below), and tends to produce less input lag when playing video games, but it won’t provide advantages for most forms of cable TV or streaming content. In 2022, some manufacturers introduced 144 Hz TVs meant to appeal specifically to gamers, but the majority of TVs still have 60 or 120 Hz refresh rates.
Judder: This term refers to a slightly jerky motion that can occur when 24p film content appears on a TV with a 60 Hz refresh rate. In such situations, to make 24 frames match up to the 60 Hz display, half of the frames appear two times and the other half appear three times. This display technique causes judder, which is most noticeable on panning shots. Some 120 Hz displays avoid this effect by repeating each film frame five times, while some 60 Hz panels run at 48 Hz to show each frame twice.
Motion smoothing: Motion smoothing, sometimes called MEMC (Motion Estimation/Motion Compensation), refers to a TV’s ability to intelligently create new frames to create smoother-looking or less juddery motion. Most modern TVs can artificially increase their refresh rates to smooth out fast or difficult sequences, but the efficacy of this motion smoothing is often dependent upon the TV’s native refresh rate. Motion smoothing is also the cause of the “soap opera effect,” where cinematic/24p content looks more like a daytime soap opera due to the insertion of unnecessary frames. The best TVs come with multiple motion smoothing presets, and some even allow the user to fine-tune the degree of judder reduction and frame interpolation employed. When used correctly, motion smoothing can make content like sports and nature documentaries look more realistic, but we prefer it be turned off for content like premium TV, movies, and video games.
And for those of us who prefer recordings to catch up, don’t want to pay for Sky channels, or just want to cut back on subscription direct debits, free-to-air digital channels on Freeview or Freesat are essential. We think you can’t beat the convenience of pausing, rewinding and recording your favourite live TV, and you’ll need one of the best set-top boxes to store those programmes.
Good quality TV set-top boxes give you access to a wide range of free-to-air digital channels – or to subscription channels through Sky or Virgin – and will let you record them to catch up later. That’s helpful if you’re a Wimbledon fan but the kids want to watch something else.
Once you’ve connected them to an aerial or satellite dish, all of today’s TVs pick up one or both of the UK’s free-to-air digital TV services (Freeview and Freesat). But, you can only pause and rewind live TV if you have a set-top box. There are benefits to getting a pay TV subscription box from the likes of Sky or Virgin too, as these have more premium channels for extra movies and shows. We’ve included Freeview, Freesat and subscription boxes in our roundup.
They all connect to your TV via an HDMI cable and deliver hundreds of channels (if not more) through either your aerial or dish. They come with built-in storage for recording your programmes, and many of the best set-top boxes connect to the internet to bring your streaming services like Netflix, BBC iPlayer and Amazon Prime Video straight to your TV.
We try out the best set-top boxes and test out all the functions, including pausing and rewinding live TV, using them just like you would at home. We experiment with recording programmes, checking how many you can record and watch at once, and we look at how quickly you can navigate around the interface to find your recordings, so you can get on with watching The Repair Shop as soon as possible. We also check how easy it is to access catch-up and streaming services from the box.