<< 1 >>
Rating: 
Summary: I like this television
Review: I bought it a week ago online from Costco for $1999 plus shipping. I realize this is last year's model and that the 27HL84 is the newer one. I was attracted by what appears to be Costco's generous return policy: full refund, no time limit. If it breaks, I'll just return it to the store. We'll see how forthright they are.
The picture in HDTV and Comcast digital cable is tremendous, with HDTV having the edge by a large margin. The side stereo speakers are alkso excellent, not as good as my audio set-up but very acceptable. Remote doesn't work well with the Comcast cable box. You lose most of its functions, like stepped mute and split screen. Still there is that great picture. Toshiba phone support was responsive and knowledgable.
I highly recommend this television.
Rating: 
Summary: Ideal for watching DVDs
Review: I bought this TV a few weeks ago and so far I am happy with it. I haven't had a chance to hook up Satelite or Cable to it yet, but I will be doing that in the near future.I bought this TV along with a Panasonic home theather system and it provides the best home theather experience I can imagine for my bedroom. DVDs in progressive scan using component cables (I use monster video 2's) look absolutley stunning - just like in the movies if not better - but only from far away. You have to be at least 80 inches (about 6 and 1/2 feet) away from it. The closer you get to it, the more the pixels become apparent. This TV also has a very slight ghosting problem. Although you can't see it from a far away distance at all (80 inches or so as I've mentioned earlier) it becomes apparent when you're close. All LCD TVs have issues similar to this from what I have seen, so I would recommend an LCD TV only to those who will be watching it from a good distance. The rule of thumb is to watch from a distance of 3 times the size of the diagonal, so for this 26" LCD TV you would wanna be at least 78 inches away. This happens to sound correct given that in my personal experience this was really the best distance to look at it from. For those looking for a home theather experience, don't let the relativley small size (26") fool you. Since the TV is widescreen watching enchanced for 16:9 DVDs elminates the black bars on the top and bottom of the screen. The size of the image itself on such movies is roughly equivalent to a 32" 4:3 Aspect "Square" TV, since on such a TV you have the black bars which take away from the size of the image. This TV does a GREAT job of making you think you're at the movies, especially with the back lighting and picture settings on TV set to "Movie". If you get the settings right, it looks as if you're looking at a projector in the movies. Having a home theather system with surround sound and a subwoofer (5.1) also enchances the experience a lot. I've watched Signs, Snatch, and Rocky IV on it, and I was absolutley delighted with the quality of the experience. I highly recommend it for anyone looking for a home theather TV to watch DVDs or HDTV Movies on. But remember to reserve some distance between the TV and where you will sit or the quality of the picture and thus home theather experience will suffer. 80" is my personal minimum.
Rating:
Summary: Very sharp picture, less good software
Review: I bought this TV based almost entirely on the quality of the picture; it blew everything else away. I'm still very happy with this.
However, the software is less impressive.
The picture quality is undoubtedly a product of algorithms ensuring good contrast and range, and the picture can be further tweaked to viewer preferences. So far, so good.
It would seem to me that it would be fairly easy to write code that would determine the aspect ration of the picture being fed into the TV and adjust the picture accordingly. This could be overidden by the viewer. Similarly, it should be possible to access the inputs and determine which one had a signal. Instead, one has to mess around with the picture size and inputs which involves finding the remote control....
I don't know whether this is a problem with all modern TVs or not, or perhaps most users are not so fussy about bits of the picture disappearing off the edges. With this model, this aspect of its design could definitely be improved.
While I don't use the internal speakers, I have tried them out; the quality of sound is really very good for a TV.
<< 1 >>
| 
