Sign up for the FREE Tell Membership and receive benefits that include the digital edition of Tell Magazine sent straight to your inbox, product giveaways, coupons and much more!
Sign up for the FREE Tell Membership and receive benefits that include the digital edition of Tell Magazine sent straight to your inbox, product giveaways, coupons and much more!
Although my household keeps TV watching rooted in the family room, many families enjoy having a small television in the kitchen, bedroom or even a bathroom. Unless you’re a hardcore gearhead, you’re probably not looking for a big screen with surround sound in these smaller venues. For these areas, ease of use, a small footprint and an affordable price tag are likely to be the critical selling points.
The L19W661 is a 19-inch widescreen HDTV with an integrated high def tuner, stereo speakers and both HDMI and PC inputs. The latter means it can easily double as a computer monitor. The rear cover easily detaches to make the necessary connections, but the recess could use a little more room for fellow sufferers of “man hands.”
Setting up the display was a piece of cake and frankly, I was quite impressed by the on-screen wizards and setup menus. Envision has gone a long way to make setup and channel programming as simple (and color-coded) as possible. This is refreshing to see at this price point and I was continually reminded of the simplicity offered by a Microsoft software installation wizard (minus the system crashes).
The remote control is a classy-looking black and chrome number and makes good use of color-coded buttons during the aforementioned setup menus. My only serious gripe with the remote is its dual set of cursor/directional keys. The larger top set are actually channel and volume buttons, but every time I entered a system menu I was tempted to use them. Then I remembered I have to use the smaller, inferior set on the lower portion of the remote. This isn’t a huge deal, but it was enough of a pain that it warrants mention.
Like many small LCDs, the Envision has a noticeable bright bar across the top and bottom of the display when looking at a black screen. These areas aren’t noticeably brighter during regular program viewing, but if you plan to watch a lot of widescreen movies, your black bars may not look very black. Generally speaking, picture quality was very good and the integrated ATSC tuner did a fine job picking up more than a dozen local digital broadcasts. I find that most LCDs have a somewhat grainy image – sort of a constant low-level video noise – and the L19W661 was no exception. If you sit very close this might be a problem, but from two or three screen widths away, it was barely noticeable.
To test out the HDMI input and see what the Envision could do, I hooked up my Philips Blu-ray Disc player. Watching Sony’s Immortal Beloved on Blu-ray yielded an excellent picture, superior to that of my local hi def broadcasts. Out of the box, colors were a bit oversaturated and sharpness was too high but these things were easy to fix.
As a computer monitor, the Envision was a mixed bag. I set my Dell’s nVidia graphics card to output 1440 x 900 and at first, all seemed great. However, when switching users on the XP machine, the image would often shift north a good inch or two. This was usually fixed by switching users again, but that grew old quickly. I’m not sure if this phenomenon was the fault of the video card or the display as I did not have another PC in-house to test with. When the image filled the screen though, life was good and the 5ms response time impressed when watching movie trailers at apple.com.
With street pricing under $400, the L19W661 is an exceptional value for the money. yy
Submit your own reviews in our forums.
Related Posts