Perfect price for a great little TV Westinghouse LTV 20V4 20 in. EDTV Ready LCD TV
Westinghouse LTV-20V4 20 in. EDTV-Ready LCD TV Product MPNMPN:LTV-20V4 Key FeaturesFlat Panel Type:LCD TVScreen Size:20 inchContrast Ratio:400:1Digital TV S...
Compare Prices and Read Reviews on Westinghouse LTV-27W2 27 in. HDTV-Ready LCD TV When you see this unit you wonder why the others are so expensive! The 21" CRT TV that i had in my bedroom recently died after over 12 years. Time for an upgrade. I definately wanted LCD and HDTV capabilitie...
A few days ago at the time of this review my wife and I got the idea in our heads that we would love to be able to get rid of the 19 inch ancient tube TV in our bedroom and get a more modern TV, preferably an LCD flat panel TV in the 20 inch range. Well, after looking up prices on the Internet we decided we didn’t want one THAT badly. The lowest price we could find on anything was $300 at a Sam’s Club. Otherwise the next closest was $350 for a Westinghouse LTV-20V4 at Best Buy, which we have local. That same TV could be found on the web at various sites for $300. All still outside of what we were willing to spend. I didn’t let the idea rest and kept reading reviews and looking on E-Bay and various other sites and stumbled on the LTV-20V4 at eCost.com for $250. Awesome I thought. We might be able to do that. Then I noticed it had a $50 rebate, and next day shipping was only $20. WOW! A 20 inch flat panel LCD TV for $220? I couldn’t let it go. I looked up the few reviews I could find on it and everyone seemed to agree that it wasn’t a high end TV, but as a TV for the bedroom, kitchen, kid’s room, etc it was great. I decided to take the risk and get it. My wife and I figured it couldn’t be any worse than the 15 year old tube TV we had. A day and a half later, it arrived and I got it installed, plugged in the Tivo to it, and a DVD player and tried it out. I wasn’t disappointed at all. It was MUCH better than the TV we had. In fact, after a few minor adjustments to brightness, contrast, gamma, and color levels to match the room lighting conditions, it had a very nice picture indeed. I am very pleased with this TV and my wife is still jumping for joy about it. Now let’s get down to some specifics.
Size/weight. The size is perfect. It’s only 19 inches wide and 20 inches high. The LCD portion is 3 inches thick. The base is 6 inches, so it only takes up a maximum of 6 inches from the wall using the base. That’a a far cry better than the old tube TV that always looked like it was ready to fall off the dresser. It’s super light. With base it’s only about 13 pounds, so I had no concerns with sitting it on top of the DVD player I connected to it. The color in the pictures you may find on the web show it as a silver color, but in reality it’s more like a platinum or pewter. Just a slightly muted silver that makes it really look good sitting there.
Picture - The TV is only rated at a 640×480 resolution. Being a computer tech, this concerned me because I equated it with display resolution on a computer, but in the world of TV it turns out that it’s more than adeqaute for a very nice picture. Actually, the picture is much better than the tube TV we replaced. I was very surprised to find that on fast motion video, there was no artfacting or pixelation… the condition where the pixels can’t turn on and off fast enough so you see a ghosting motion or blur behind the fast moving object. I could only detect the tiniest amount of this if I really looked close, but it was really hard to detect even then. During normal viewing, it’s impossible to even detect it. The color out of the box was a little dim and the colors were muted or “muddy” as my wife calls it. It only took a few seconds to bump up the brightness a couple of notches, drop the sharpness about a notch, and increase the gamma a notch or two, and change the flesh tone setting from mild to medium, and it looked perfect. The colors are rendered vividly and accurately. I was also concerned with the relatively low (by today’s standards) of a 400:1 contrast ratio. In very bright sunlight, that may be an issue but inside any normal room in a house it turns out to be more than enough. In the bedroom where we have it located, it looks like a much higher contrast ratio.
Sound - Sound is just fine. It’s right on par with any other normal TV you might find. Nothing special, but not bad either. Nothing stands out as either really good or really bad about it. Voices sound natural and neutral with no shift toward either bass or treble.
Inputs - You have your choice of 4 different inputs. 1 - Standard antenna or cable RF. 2 - Input one which has left and right audio, composite (single yellow video cable) and S-Video. 3 - Input 2 which is the same as input 1. 4 - Input 3 which is component only (RGB video and 2 audio). In other words, it has the inputs to plug anything into it that you would want to.
Adjustments - For the price you wouldn’t expect to find adjustments down to individual color levels, but you indeed do find the whole range of adjustments on this TV. From sound to brightness, contrast, gamma, red, green, blue… you get it all. If you can’t adjust the picture the way you want it with all the adjustments it provides, then you aren’t trying hard enough. The menu is easy to use and understand too.
Misc - Setup was a breeze. Out of the box you just plug it into cable and it works. I had it scan the channels just to clear out the missing channels from the default list, but that’s all I had to do other than adjust the picture to my taste. Sleep timer - It has a sleep timer built in that is very easy to use. Press the sleep button on the remote to engage sleep mode. Press it multiple times to cycle between 30, 60, 90, or 120 minutes before auto power off. Color presets - it has 4 or 5 pre-set color selections that you can chose from for viewing various types of movies or programs. Warmer colors for talk shows or news (things mostly about people) to theater settings for darker movies like those scary movies that are always filmed at night or in dark conditions. Remote - the remote is small and simple to use. Nothing really special to say about it. It’s not bulky, and has a nice button arrangement so it’s easy to use.
Bottom line - If you want a good quality LCD for an absolutely awesome price you just can’t go wrong with this if you can find it on sale or with rebate like I did. I would not hesitate to recommend it. In fact, I’ve only had it a few days and have already made several people jealous over it.
Price - in case I didn’t mention it enough before, $220!!! That says it all
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