the Insignia NS-L42X-10A HDTVs

Insignia NS-L42X-10A

Not everyone has the need—or the budget—for the latest and greatest in television technology. Features such as LED backlighting, 240Hz refresh rates, and Web connectivity are all the rage right now, but as is usually the case with new tech, you’ll pay a premium for it. Enter the Insignia NS-L42X-10A, one in a series of four low-cost 1080p 120Hz HDTVs offered exclusively by Best Buy. Priced at $749.99, this 42-inch LCD model may not offer much in the way of features or aesthetics, and its picture quality is less than perfect, but if you’re looking for a cheap, no-frills flat-screen TV for, say, the basement, or a playroom, it’ll fit the bill.

Design and Appearance
The 42-inch panel is housed in a plain-looking black cabinet. The display is bordered by a relatively wide glossy black bezel on three sides, and an extra-wide lower bezel which curves upwards at the bottom. I’m not a fan of the design: it looks a bit flimsy and lacks the clean lines found on much-pricier models such as the LG 42SL80 and the Toshiba Regza 46SV670U. The matching stand is fairly stable and does a good job of supporting the 37-pound screen, and it swivels so you can position the display for optimal viewing. The two 12-watt speakers provide plenty of volume, and the SRS TruSurround feature does a fairly good job of simulating a multi-channel audio experience, but you’ll need a subwoofer if you want pumping bass, since you won’t find any here.

Recessed into the right side of the cabinet are buttons for powering up the set, changing channels, selecting an input source, raising and lowering the volume, and accessing the on-screen menu system. On the left are two of the five HDMI ports, VGA (PC) and S-Video inputs, a PC audio input, composite audio and video ports, and a headphone jack. Around back are three additional HDMI ports, two sets of component audio and video inputs, a digital (SPDIF) output, one set of analog stereo audio outputs, a secondary S-Video input, and a secondary set of composite A/V inputs. While it’s nice to have five HDMI ports, you won’t find a card reader, Ethernet, or USB ports—features which can be found on many of today’s midrange models such as the Sharp Aquos LC-40LE700UN and the Toshiba 46SV670U.

The 52-button remote is tapered in the middle and fits comfortably in your hand, but it’s a bit on the small side and the buttons feel slightly crowded. The four-way rocker is very responsive, however, making it easy to zip through the on-screen menus. The uncomplicated menu structure is broken into four basic submenus; Picture, Audio, Channels, and Settings. The Picture section is where you can tweak brightness, contrast, sharpness, color, and tint levels. In the Advanced video menu you can adjust backlighting and color temperature settings and enable/disable noise reduction and dynamic contrast ratio functionality. Here you can also choose one of three Digital Clear Motion levels (DCM), which uses 120Hz technology to help reduce motion blur, or you can disable the feature altogether. There’s also a switch that enables a light sensor, which adjusts the screen’s brightness according to the ambient lighting environment. I suggest leaving this feature off; in my tests, the luminance level, which changed often, was very distracting.

The Audio menu provides settings for bass, treble, balance, and SRS TruSurround as well as a dynamic volume setting that compensates for sudden changes in sound level during broadcasts. The Channels menu lets you hide channels and create a favorites list, and the Settings menu is where you can set up parental controls and assign a parental-control password.

Image Quality and Performance
After a darkroom calibration using the DisplayMate for Windows Multimedia Edition diagnostic software, the NS-L42X-10A turned in a contrast ratio of 3207:1, which is quite good for an HDTV that uses CCFL backlighting. It takes more than a high contrast ratio to deliver a high quality picture, though. Greens and blues were saturated, resulting in uneven skin tones and tinting in certain shades of gray. The high contrast ratio helped deliver deep blacks, but I noticed significant motion artifacts in the form of background noise while watching scenes from The Matrix in standard definition. There was a fair amount of image smearing as well. Not surprisingly, the panel was unable to pass the HD HQV Jaggies benchmark, which tests de-interlacing performance.

The set fared better with 1080p HD content. Mission: Impossible 2 on Blu-ray was sharp, but once again I observed subtle smearing and some judder, particularly during the opening rock climbing scene where the camera is continually panning. Enabling the DCM feature helped reduce the judder effect, but the resulting picture looked too sharp and overly noisy. In my tests, viewing angles were fine up to around 165 degrees off center; after that, colors began to fade.

The NS-L42X-10A draws an average of 220 watts, which means it’ll cost around $3.60 a month to run (based on five hours of daily use using the 2008 national average cost of $0.1135 per kWh). While not as energy efficient as some of the newer LED-backlit HDTVs like the 40-inch Sharp LC-40LE700UN, which draws only 120 watts, it’s far from a power hog. Whereas most HDTVs come with a one-year warranty, Insignia provides a two-year plan at no extra cost.

Overall, the big draw of the Insignia NS-L42X-10A is its rock-bottom $750 price. Even in these days of freefalling HDTV prices, it’s tough to find a 1080p 42-inch set for less, let alone one with a two-year warranty. It’s certainly not the sexiest-looking model you’ll find, and its performance is pretty much what you’d expect from a low-cost HDTV, but despite these shortcomings, its low price, two-year warranty, and plethora of HDMI ports help to redeem the NS-L42X-10A . That said, if you have a few extra bucks to spend, the 40-inch Sharp Aquos LC-40LE700UN offers better performance and a more robust feature set, and can be had for around $950 online.

The VAIO VPC-L117FX/B looks like it could be a Sony Bravia HDTV

Sony VAIO VPC L117FX B

Among the all in one all-in-one desktop PC, the Sony VAIO VPC-L117FX/B ($2,000 list) is certainly one of the best looking. It has the look of a 24-inch HDTV, an intentional design choice. Inside that sexy shell is the heart of a power user’s PC: quad-core Intel processor, 6GB of memory, 1TB hard drive, Blu-ray burner, and a decent Nvidia graphics card. Placement in the kitchen, den, home office, and living room come to mind, but like its Sony VAIO all in one predecessors, it will even work in the most design critical room in the house: the bedroom.

Design
The VAIO VPC-L117FX/B looks like it could be a Sony Bravia HDTV. That is one of its greatest strengths, since it can blend in anywhere a smaller (20- to 36-inch) HDTV fits. It can even replace a TV in the bedroom, since it has a built-in Blu-ray drive, ATSC tuner, and HDMI-in ports. Viewing Blu-ray videos on the VAIO give you that “view through a window” effect that makes it seem like the action is happening on the other side of the display glass. We tested the system with films made before (Coming to America, The Warriors) and after the advent of CGI (Star Trek, Mission Impossible II). All of the films looked great. The picture is vivid, accurate, and noise-free. The HDMI-in port lets you connect a game system like a Sony Playstation 3 or a set-top box like the one from you cable TV company. The built-in tuner grabs over the air HDTV signals and displays them in Windows 7’s built-in Media Center interface. There’s a slot built into the base of the unit, so you can stow the wireless keyboard out of the way when you’re not using it, and the keyboard and mouse can easily reach a bed or couch 10 to 15 feet away. The system is wall mountable with a kit you can buy separately.

The all-in-one comes with five USB ports, a FireWire/i.Link port, and that 24-inch 1,920 by 1,080 resolution screen (which is true 1080p HD). This is truly a power-users’ system, and it better be one for $2,000. The system also comes with 802.11b/g/n Wi-Fi and an IR remote control so you can work almost completely wireless.

Features
The system’s touchscreen is responsive, though it takes a few seconds for your finger to learn exactly where to point to get the screen to recognize your commands. The HP TouchSmart systems are a little more forgiving with finger placement, but both the Sony and HP all in one PC’s screens are multi-touch enabled and can use standard Windows 7 touch command functions like swipe, flick, pinch, and rotate. The system’s quad-core processor makes the Sony VPC-L117FX/B just a little more responsive than the TouchSmart 600, but you’re unlikely to notice the difference unless you have the two side by side. Aside from the usual Windows 7 apps, the VAIO VPC-L117FX/B comes with VAIO Media Gallery, a unified multimedia viewing interface that lets you quickly view all your music, photos, and videos on a variety of formats, including neat calendar-organized formats. This serves a range of users from the “messy but organized” types to the obsessive compulsives that have to have their photos organized by time stamps. Media Gallery allows you to group photos arbitrarily or via searchable criteria; then you can create a quick slideshow with a couple of touches, then export to VAIO Movie Story. VAIO Movie Story is a quick way to create well, if not edited, then concatenated home movie made of your pictures, clips from your digital camera, and clips from your cell phone. Movie Story can either use music you choose, or it will check the videos with an algorithm and automatically suggest or add music. You can then burn the resulting movie to DVD or Blu-ray disc, save the file in a variety of media formats (including MPEG-2, MP4, etc.), or export your file to a Sony Media device like a PSP or a Mylo. I’d like to see an integrated export to iTunes/iPod or better yet an export to Facebook or Youtube, but you could of course do that manually after you create a file.

The VAIO VPC-L117FX/B comes with Google’s Chrome as its default browser, but like all Windows 7 PCs, it also comes with Internet Explorer 8. I found that touch navigation works better in IE8, since I couldn’t scroll slowly in Chrome—it only recognized flick commands like page forward/back and page up/down. Scrolling up and down in IE8 using finger gestures was smooth and worked as expected. I’m sure Google will improve the interface over time, but for now IE8 is the better touch-enabled browser on the VAIO.

Aside from the useful software above, there’s very little in the way of bloatware on the VAIO VPC-L117FX/B. There’s a copy of Microsoft Works, which is useful. Then there’s an installer for a 60-day trial of Microsoft Office, which is the right way to both satisfy Microsoft’s agreements with Sony, and to avoid the dreaded “pre-installed Office” syndrome. Likewise, there’s a link to Quicken’s Website for offers on QuickBooks and Quicken, but you have to download and install them. Believe me, this is a good thing. You don’t have to install Office or Quickbooks unless you want to, so there’s nothing to clean up and therefore no stray .DLL files or leftover detritus to muck up your hard drive. If there’s any drawback to the Sony VAIO Media software, it’s that it’s not as modular as HP’s TouchSmart interface, with its widgets and iPod Touch-style apps. On the other hand, VAIO Media Gallery and Movie Story are some of the most intuitive and easiest to use pack-in multimedia apps outside of Apple’s iLife (iMovie, iDVD, etc.).

Performance
The VAIO VPC-L117FX/B’s performance is very good, thanks to its Intel Core 2 Quad 8400S processor and Nvidia GeForce GT 240M graphics, though it’s tied for the class leader in only one of our standard benchmark tests. The VAIO is speedy at the PhotoShop CS4 test with a class-leading 1 minute 39 seconds, tied with the Gateway One ZX6810-01. It’s also only one second behind the Gateway FX6810-01 at the Windows Media Encoder test (43 seconds), which makes the VAIO VPC-L117FX/B an excellent choice for the multimedia enthusiast. It’s other scores are competitive in the field of multimedia all in one desktops, including the dual-core powered Apple iMac 27-inch (Core 2 Duo), Lenovo IdeaCentre A600 (3011-4BU), and the Editor’s Choice HP TouchSmart 600-1055 PC. The VAIO VPC-L117FX/B can be used for light gaming: it played World in Conflict at a smooth 39 frames per second (fps), but is a little too slow playing Crysis at our standard settings (30fps). If you push the quality levels and/or resolution down you can likely get a playable frame rate in Crysis. The GPU does help with programs like Microsoft’s Virtual Earth and HD video playback from the web.

As a high-end all-in-one desktop PC, the Sony VAIO VPC-L117FX/B is a little pricey at about $2,000, but you can just about rationalize the added expense if you consider the system has one of the best quality screens in the business, Blu-ray burner (as opposed to just a player for the Lenovo A600 and HP TouchSmart 600), and its looks more like an HDTV than a PC, unlike the iMac, Gateway One, Lenovo IdeaCentre, and HP TouchSmart. That said, these other four are a lot less expensive, especially in the case of the Gateway One and Lenovo A600 (both $1,399 list). The Gateway One is the performance leader overall, with a speedy Solid State Drive (SSD) helping its quad-core processor take five wins out of the seven benchmark tests. However, the Editor’s Choice winning HP TouchSmart 600-1055 has the most polished implementation of touch technology in Windows 7, along with the best bang for the buck ($1,599 list) out of all the multimedia all in ones. The Sony VAIO VPC-L117FX/B is a “better quality” choice if you’re willing to spend the bucks, but you’d have to be a individual who’s really hard to please to justify an almost $500 price premium.