A few weeks ago we noticed that our 9 year old Sony television in our living room was starting to have problems. When we were watching the TV we would see the picture start to become wavy, and the resulting image was very distorted. This happened for a week or two until one day it finally just flipped off on its own for good.
We decided it was time to get a new TV for the living room, hopefully something just as big or bigger. We did have space restrictions, however since we were placing the unit in the existing entertainment center. That meant that the biggest we could go for an LCD screen was 32 inches.
After doing our research, we decided to go with a lower end house brand, sold at Best Buy - an Insignia NS-LCD32 32" LCD TV.
When buying expensive electronics I am almost always wary of the house brands sold at the major electronics stores as they will often have quality problems and are almost always cheaply made by some factory in China. After reading up on the Insignia brand, they didn't seem to be much different. However when I looked deeper at some of the reviews I realized that the models made by the company in previous years hadn't been very good, but in the past year or so their quality seems to have gone up. The reviewers tended to be more positive. (I should have paid attention to the problems others had - i am having the same problems now 3 months along).
After viewing the Insignia TVs in the store I was impressed with the picture quality that I saw in the store wall-mounted units. Granted, this isn't always the best place to judge quality of a picture, but nonetheless, it looked good. The picture was even better than some more expensive units. Also, the unit does look nice in my opinion - the bezel around the LCD Panel is a glossy piano black, as is the TV stand. Maybe a little too much gloss, but still very nice.
After comparing a few more of the TVs to this one, we decided that for the price we would pay (about $500) for the unit, we were getting a pretty good deal on a TV with enough options for use as a 2nd TV in our living room.
So what type of inputs does this TV have? Here they are:
2 HDMI
2 Component
2 Composite
1 S Video
1 VGA
Right now we're using the 1 component and 2 composite inputs, and everything seems to look pretty good. The DVD player hooked up to the composite input obviously doesn't look amazing, but i'm sure it will be better once we hook it up using component cables. Our media player hooked up to the component hookup looks great at 480p.
So far the only HDTV signal we've been able to watch on the TV is the digital TV channels that we pick up. This past weekend I watched some football and some primetime TV shows in HD, and they looked amazing.
The sound on the TV is pretty good for TV speakers, but not mind blowing. The TV does have optical audio out as well if you want to hook it up to your receiver. I'm sure you'll get much better sound that way.
All in all I feel like we've gotten our money's worth on this TV, and we would probably buy it again. Hopefully we'll still feel that way in a few months. If not, we'll post an update with any problems that we've had.
UPDATE:
Well, unfortunately I have to post an update about this TV as it is having all sorts of issues only 3 months after buying it. Right now the biggest problem we're having is that the TV just randomly turns itself off several times every time we watch it. When the picture is on - it works great. But it is a pain to have to deal with these random resets where it turns itself off and then back on. Buyer Beware of this TV.
Other reviews:
Benchmark Reviews - 8.95 out of 10
Official Thread at AVSFORUM.com
Your View Electronics Review - 8/10 stars
We decided it was time to get a new TV for the living room, hopefully something just as big or bigger. We did have space restrictions, however since we were placing the unit in the existing entertainment center. That meant that the biggest we could go for an LCD screen was 32 inches.
After doing our research, we decided to go with a lower end house brand, sold at Best Buy - an Insignia NS-LCD32 32" LCD TV.
When buying expensive electronics I am almost always wary of the house brands sold at the major electronics stores as they will often have quality problems and are almost always cheaply made by some factory in China. After reading up on the Insignia brand, they didn't seem to be much different. However when I looked deeper at some of the reviews I realized that the models made by the company in previous years hadn't been very good, but in the past year or so their quality seems to have gone up. The reviewers tended to be more positive. (I should have paid attention to the problems others had - i am having the same problems now 3 months along).
After viewing the Insignia TVs in the store I was impressed with the picture quality that I saw in the store wall-mounted units. Granted, this isn't always the best place to judge quality of a picture, but nonetheless, it looked good. The picture was even better than some more expensive units. Also, the unit does look nice in my opinion - the bezel around the LCD Panel is a glossy piano black, as is the TV stand. Maybe a little too much gloss, but still very nice.
After comparing a few more of the TVs to this one, we decided that for the price we would pay (about $500) for the unit, we were getting a pretty good deal on a TV with enough options for use as a 2nd TV in our living room.
So what type of inputs does this TV have? Here they are:
2 HDMI
2 Component
2 Composite
1 S Video
1 VGA
Right now we're using the 1 component and 2 composite inputs, and everything seems to look pretty good. The DVD player hooked up to the composite input obviously doesn't look amazing, but i'm sure it will be better once we hook it up using component cables. Our media player hooked up to the component hookup looks great at 480p.
So far the only HDTV signal we've been able to watch on the TV is the digital TV channels that we pick up. This past weekend I watched some football and some primetime TV shows in HD, and they looked amazing.
The sound on the TV is pretty good for TV speakers, but not mind blowing. The TV does have optical audio out as well if you want to hook it up to your receiver. I'm sure you'll get much better sound that way.
All in all I feel like we've gotten our money's worth on this TV, and we would probably buy it again. Hopefully we'll still feel that way in a few months. If not, we'll post an update with any problems that we've had.
UPDATE:
Well, unfortunately I have to post an update about this TV as it is having all sorts of issues only 3 months after buying it. Right now the biggest problem we're having is that the TV just randomly turns itself off several times every time we watch it. When the picture is on - it works great. But it is a pain to have to deal with these random resets where it turns itself off and then back on. Buyer Beware of this TV.
Other reviews:
Benchmark Reviews - 8.95 out of 10
Official Thread at AVSFORUM.com
Your View Electronics Review - 8/10 stars