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Does your sofa look just like your neighbors’? When you decide to paint your living room, how many colors does Home Depot have to choose from—two or three? Of course not, so why should your TV look just like everyone else’s TV? That’s just what Hannspree thought when it decided the world needed more variety in its selection of flat panel televisions and PC monitors. Most plasma and LCD TVs come in either silver/gray or black bezels. Some are glossier than others, and some put speakers on the side instead of on the bottom, but the creativity pretty much ends there.
Hannspree, on the other hand, offers more design variety in one screen size than any other company has in their whole line. Of course, whether one of these designs is right for your room is another issue. This is the company that puts LCD TVs into basketballs, offers TVs with Cinderella carriage frames and even offers a 42-inch plasma TV that looks like a fire truck. This particular TV, the 32-inch Vibe, has a bit of a Battlestar Galactica look to it. Being a Galactica and Dr. Who fan myself, I think it’s kinda cool. The white plastic accented by oversized buttons and large oblong speakers may look out of place in an early American family room but may fit well in a contemporary den or bedroom.
The Hannspree Vibe features a 16:9, 1366×768 LCD panel with a hardy 1,200:1 contrast ratio. It’s got a standard suite of ins and outs, though not an abundance of any. There’s one HDMI input, two each component, S-video and composite plus a 15-pin input for using it as a computer monitor. You get two antenna/cable inputs, one for analog NTSC and one for digital ATSC/QAM signals.
The speakers are removable, and so are not wired internally to the TV. It comes with its own speaker wire (two six foot segments) with customized connections on the ends so speaker placement is limited by the length of the wires—you can’t use your own speaker wire. I like the look of the TV without the speakers and would probably opt to use a separate sound system anyway (There is an optical audio output on the back for sending the audio to a surround sound receiver). The speakers are boosted by BBE Sound’s VIVA that give the stereo signal a more three-dimentional effect. There are several equalizer options available in the TV’s menu.
The Vibe’s digital TV tuner effectively pulled in all the digital channels available in our Philadelphia location. Finding them was a snap with the TV’s auto scan function. When changing digital channels, the TV shows you a handy channel banner, the station name and number, current and next program (where that info is available) and signal strength. It’s not an onscreen program guide, but it’s still nice to have. And in fact the TV’s built-in tuner did a very good job of pulling in even distant digital channels with only an inexpensive indoor tabletop antenna.
High definition pictures from the tuner were solid, if a little softer than I’ve seen on some LCDs. Colors on ABC’s The View were strong. Fast motion, found in sports or explosion scenes in movies, created a little bit of motion blur, but not too bad. The Vibe’s got a response time of 8ms, which isn’t the fastest in the industry, but it’s sufficient for the size of the TV if you’re not right on top of it.
Hannspree TVs are not for everyone. Some people may want their TV to disappear into the background when it’s not one, while TVs like this Vibe really call attention to themselves. While most other TV makers have taken the safe white bread approach to electronics, Hannspree wants you to be able to express yourself. Now if only they’d come out with a snake skin model.
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