Ease of Use, Performance: 25/25, Look & Feel: 24/25,
Features 24/25, How much I enjoy 25/25
Total: 100/100
Vizio is a relative newcomer in the world of TV’s but has been rocking the consumer electronics world with its extensive line of high quality affordable televisions. With accolades from Good Housekeeping, CNET and PC World I have to add my own praise to the current line of affordable and great looking televisions.
The Vizio 26″ LCD HDTV model number VW26L gets my special Blue Ribbon Award for an outstanding product and overall great television. The Vizio HDTV is a great television with some great features at a really affordable price for a high definition 1080i LCD television.
Here are the features straight from the Vizio website:
26″ Diagonal / 16 x 9 Wide Screen Aspect Ratio
High Definition 1366 x 768 Native Resolution
Compatible Input Formats (1080i HD, 720p HD, 480p DVD, 480i standard TV)
PC formats supported 1366 x 768, 1024 x 768, 800 x 600, 720 x 400, 640 x 480
Ideal TV For Bright Light Environments
Brilliant Picture Quality With Over 16 Million Colors
Built-In Digital HDTV & Standard TV Combined Tuner
Wall Mounting Capable; Only 3.49 Inches Thick W/O Stand
Supports High Definition Gaming Systems
2x HDMI Inputs For Superior Digital Connectivity
No Permanent Burn-In Guaranteed
Typical Panel Life of 50,000 Hours (22 Years*)
*Defined By Time To Half Original Brightness Using The TV For An Average Of 6 Hours Per Day
Some of the features that I like a lot with the Vizio TV are the combined TV tuner and the great picture quality with easy adjustments. The Vizio HDTV is an affordable price as well at about $448 at many local stores such as Wal-Mart and Kmart. The Vizio 26″ HDTV comes with the television, power cord, remote control with batteries, manual and a quick start guide.
One of the first things that stood out to me was the remote takes AA batteries and not those tiny AAA ones, I really like a remote that takes the more common size batteries. Why do companies think that a smaller remote means better, it’s just easier to loose.
The remote is a nice size and easy to understand and use. You really do not have to search the manual to figure out the menu and settings as well as setting up the channels. Just go to the TV heading, choose the TV Input source and run the Auto Search below that to find the available channels in your area.
The other thing after using the television for a few minutes was the fact that all the analog and digital channels are together and not on separate pages or whatever you want to call it. When you go up and down the channels it will go through all the ones you have found in order, analog and digital. This becomes a plus for me when my digital channels go a bit out when I loose the signal for one channel and still want to catch what is going on in the show. Just flip back one for the analog channel and you miss almost nothing.
On another television that my son bought you have to hit the TV button to change back and forth from analog to digital. You have to hope it was on that channel otherwise you have to flip through the channels and maybe miss some of what was going on. I know it’s not a big thing but it adds to the enjoyment of a TV and does stand out to me.
The Vizio 26″ HDTV has several input options for connecting your television to other devices, which I tried many out while reviewing this set. There is the common cable/antenna coaxial connection, as a set of component connections for YPbPr connections, audio video connections, VGA video and audio connections and two HDMI connections on the bottom of the set. There is also another audio video and S-video connection set on the side with a service port for television repair and testing by a qualified professional.
Connecting the Vizio 26″ HDTV to an antenna and finding those channels was easy and took only a few minutes. The quality of the picture right out of the box was fantastic and needed no adjusting. There are three preset picture quality settings for a simple pre configured picture quality adjustment and you can set your own using the contrast, brightness and other settings as well.
The backlight is one of the adjustments that is very nice for an additional picture quality adjustment that does not affect all the other settings. Backlight on the Vizo TV’s is an overall brilliance to the picture by adjusting the TV’s lamp current. The backlight adds a nice overall brilliance to the picture and the white and black level adjustments of the brightness and contrast are still totally useable and work well.
Adjusting the picture quality using a nice program called DisplayMate worked very well and the Vizio 26″ HDTV did well with all the adjustments and picture checks. DisplayMate is a computer controlled set of display patterns that allow you to adjust and check the various settings using the test patterns. The Vizio HDTV did very well during all the testing and evaluation patterns and produced very good results for all the checks and patterns.
I was able to run through the setup and performed a good check to see how the TV shows the black and white levels and the color levels using the setup and the tune up portions of DisplayMate. DisplayMate is a very subjective evaluation program but it does a great job of setting up a display and checking how well the display can perform certain test patterns.
The color and grey scale checks ran very well and I saw no problems while running through all the tests of DisplayMate. The black and white levels, color and gray scale as well as all the test patterns dealing with screen pixel resolution and sharpness ran fine. The DisplayMate program is a great way to not only set up a display, LCD or HDTV but a great way to see how well the TV or display handles things like color variations and text using screen resolution.
The Vizio 26″ HDTV works equally well as a television watching you’re favorite shows and movies as well as a console gaming television and a computer screen. Gaming on the large but not overly big screen is great and having all that screen real estate is fantastic for programs like Photoshop CS3 and image editing.
Being able to use the undocked sections of Photoshop and still have a good large area for your main image works great and is nice to not have to use a second screen for using several open programs at once. This television would be perfect for a primary and only computer screen as it is not so large that you have to look around to see the entire screen as long as it is not very close to your seated position.
The HDTV as a computer monitor worked well and using the large screen size with my work like having the word document open as well as other programs like Internet Explorer worked great. There is enough screen space to have two pages open at the same time and be both fully useable and not have to look around at a second screen.
Picture quality for gaming is fantastic for the console systems like the XBox 360 and the Wii system as well as the computer games like Quake Wars: Enemy Territory. Using the larger screens gives more of an in the game feeling for first person shooter games and this would be the perfect TV for a primary monitor on a computer. The picture clarity and quality is fantastic and for games like Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter 2 on the XBox 360 the gaming is fantastic with the almost lifelike quality the game has and the TV relays to you.
The Vizio 26″ HDTV worked very well for all the things I could throw at it and I was very pleased with the overall performance and quality. The Vizio television is affordably priced compared to other 1080i resolution HDTV’s that are much more expensive.
Overall I really enjoyed reviewing the Vizio television and will be sad to see it go back to the company. I highly recommend the Vizio 26″ HDTV as an overall fantastic high definition TV for television, console gaming and computer use.
