Review: Syntax : Olevia LT30HV 30″ LCD HDTV

Page 7: In Control

The Syntax LT30HV delivers fantastic color, and full controls that really let you tweak and adjust – with almost too much precision. The only thing that might have been nice would have been a few built in ‘calibration’ screens, like a standard color bar, or a brightness/contrast test, etc., so that you could raw calibrate the screen with a ‘pure’ source and not try to depend on any one source (whether DVD, HTPC, or TV) to be giving you an accurate baseline. Again, calibration can be done using special DVDs, or by a paid professional for a one-time fee (though videophiles probably tune every 6 or 12 months), taking out all the guesswork so the average consumer isn’t ‘left in the dark’ here. But you may also find you can do a half-decent job yourself, and most people won’t notice the difference at the end of the day.

The Picture controls are the first of four main menu ‘pages’ dividing up settings for the Olevia. The main Picture controls are: Brightness, Contrast, Backlight, Color temp, Tint, Saturation, Red Gain, Green Gain, Blue Gain, Sharpness, Noise reduction, and Input selection. Most users are familiar with Brightness and Contrast controls already.

The Backlight option allows you to turn down the ‘physical’ brightness of the TV (not the ‘computed’ brightness in terms of signal), basically turning off some amount of the fluorescent backlights – there is Bright, Normal, and Soft. My one complaint is that anything other than Bright has the side effect of causing a very low ‘hum’, which my ears are sensitive enough to pick up on.

The Color temp option some might recognize from modern computer displays, which allow you to shift the output coloring to a warmer or cooler ‘lighting’ result. Not surprising, the options are Cool (bluish), Normal (white), and Warm (reddish). I would think that you would always want this on Normal, so I’m not sure why it was even made an option.

Tint and Saturation control more precisely the color conversions under the covers. Tint gives you the ability to ‘turn’ the color wheel (remember color wheels? RGB?) – again, not likely the average user will use this. Saturation controls the, well, saturation of colors, how strongly they ‘push’ – turning down saturation has the effect of ‘washing out’ colors on the screen, to the point the image would eventually just look like shades of gray. If you are using a calibration DVD, saturation does come up so that you tune the master color balance properly. But again, one would hope the default level is decent enough.

Red, Green, and Blue Gain are effectively control over the saturation of the individual core color channels. Again, you might find these most useful when doing a real calibration of your screen, or if your eyes are just telling you that the picture looks a little too ‘red’, and you can minutely turn ‘down’ the red in the overall picture. For real calibration, these in combination with the previous controls give the ability to really tune the set for optimal picture quality.

Sharpness and Noise reduction do what they sound like. Sharpness is along a gradient, and can tune the picture to be more ‘crisp’ around the edges or to be more ‘fuzzy’ (or ‘blurry’). Noise reduction works to eliminate background signal noise from the picture, and can be set to High, Low, or Off. I generally left it on Low, but if you found there were visual artifacts (such as ghosting effects) this enables you to turn it completely off.

All said, an impressive list of controls for the pricepoint. But, I would have like to see some of it hidden in an Advanced options screen, as you generally won’t be constantly changing most of the options, and having so many options will just confuse users – or enable them to easily worsen their picture quality! I think Brightness and Backlight features were my top ‘tweak’ controls I wanted around, with the Sharpness and Noise reduction as the only others I might have wanted easy access to.

Oh, and Input brings up a quick menu of the various source video connections – the same basic menu that is brought up by the Source button, but it stays inside the menu screens after choosing.

The Audio menu offers simple control over the speakers, with Treble, Bass, and Balance options. Nothing special here, and we’ve seen TVs with full-blown custom equalizers, but more than enough for most users.

The Set-Up menu controls a whole host of features, the largest set of which relate to the TV tuner – so it’s not strange to ask why there wasn’t a separated ‘TV Tuner’ page rather than cramming them all into the Set-Up screen. Ah well.

If you don’t have cable and are hooking up to an antenna, or have basic cable and no box (or don’t want to pay for an extra box), like most modern TVs the Olevia comes well equipped with built-in tuning capabilities. It can auto-scan for channels, has fine-tuning ability to get them in sharp, the ability to add/remove channels on the go (so only real channels show up, or you can add/remove weak signal channels), mark certain channels for your favorites list (pressing the Favorite button will cycle one at a time through active channels on the list), and has the usual numeric direct entry selection of channel plus a button to recall the last channel.

The Olevia LT30HV also has a built-in clock (which you can pop up on screen for quick display of the time), plus an ‘Alarm’ function to turn on the TV at a specific time, and a Sleep function that will auto-power-off the TV in 30, 60, or 90 minutes. Sleep is a more common function, but I like the clock/alarm thing – wake up to the morning news on your TV! Of course, like an alarm clock, if you forget to turn it off it will come on every single day at whatever time you set – thus the ‘haunting’ of my house where at 10:16PM, three nights in a row, the TV mysteriously turned itself on.  I should also note that the Display button on the remote lets you bring up the clock live on screen to check the time (or you can choose to bring up the selected channel number instead).

The remaining options on the Set-Up menu are the Closed Caption toggle, Parental Control (for locking out “content not suitable for younger viewers"), the interface language used (around a dozen!), whether the Background behind the menus is solid or translucent, and an option to Reset the TV to factory default settings.

The last menu is the Screen Menu, which seems like almost an afterthought. The main option here is the Aspect control (which I suggested putting on the remote directly, as a Zoom button), and offers three mode: Full screen, 4:3, and Zoom. Full screen stretches the incoming signal to fit the screen – widescreen isn’t stretched at all, while standard TV is. 4:3 squishes the signal to fit inside a 4:3 aspect box in the center of the LCD, as if the LCD wasn’t widescreen – for normal standard signals, this leaves them unstretched, while widescreen sources would get squished. The final option is Zoom, which does a uniform zoom in on the signal – probably most useful for widescreen movies being shown on standard TV, which unlike normal standard shows can be stretched wide and tall and still fit the entire screen.

The View control does nothing more than bring up the master PIP modes menu, exactly as if you hit the View button on the remote. Seems a silly place for it, since you need the Swap button (hidden away, with the View button) to actually control the multi-view PIP modes.

The Olevia packs a wealth of Picture-In-Picture modes, including standard PIP, Split Screen (side by side, with dual-tuner support), POP3 (live picture on the left, three staged-updating channels stacked on the right), and POP13 (live picture in the middle, surround by twelve staged-update channels all around in a circle). The pictures aren’t great, but below are quick shots of the Split Screen mode and POP13 mode as quick examples. The Split Screen has the menu up, showing that you can ‘attach’ certain inputs to the left (or right) screen – in this case, I have cable coming in on the left, and my DVD player coming in on the right. Since I’m coming through my cable box, the POP13 picture is just showing ‘time elapse’ of the same channel around the edges and live in the center.