Hi Guys
Received TV yesterday and set it up. Summary is: It's no turkey! Upon opening the massive box (about the size of a queen sized bed!), I installed it very quickly and without problems.
Now, unfortunately, I have NO ACCESS to terrestrial television at all in my area. I can't get a viable analogue or digital picture, so I'm unable to pass comment on this at all. Sorry.
The Wharedale logo is extremely small, perhaps deliberately so. You'd have to really look hard to notice it. The finish is glossy piano black for the surround and the base is metal. The finish on the metal isn't top class, but you don't really notice, so that's fine. The plastic casing of the unit is very tough and looks nice. Overall, it's a decent looker. Understated and sleek. Not ostentatious.
Okay, I have plugged the following into the set.
1. Virgin cable via cheap scart cable.
2. Nintendo Wii via RCA cables.
3. XBox 360 via component on 720p + 1080i.
4. PS2 via cheap scart cable.
1. Virgin Cable
Overall, decent upscaling of SD picture via scart. Very surprised to see that the Virgin OSD (i.e. TV info etc) text is absolutely solid shaded, without ANY pixel crawl at all, that I was so used to having on my CRT.
There is noticable pixelation on channels with a low bit rate and this is particularly noticable where there are lots of shades of black. Noise reduction features actually help quite a bit here.
It appears to be significantly better at rendering SD images than my Dad's Hannspree XV37" and has none of the suspect ghosting that appears on his set.
Panning is fairly decent with less noticable judder than on my Techwood 32" LCD (you can tell I always buy budget!).
When the screen is completely black the illumination over the entire panel is great and even, unlike my patchy Techwood. It's very impressive! The blacks are also very black and contrast is better than my Techwood and the Hannspree.
2. Nintendo Wii via RCA cables.
It's clean and lovely. Surfing the web is good on it and text is clear and readable. Makes SD look good!
3. XBox 360 via component @ 720p and 1080i
Absolutely fantastic. We have a Sammy 32" in the office and I have to say that this TV is every bit as good in terms of static picture quality and motion. Playing Halo 3 is great, and I can now read those small bits of text that were impossible on my 28" CRT. Handles everything Halo can throw at it with ease. Although, turn off all noise reduction settings for best results. Also, don't have the picture on "Dynamic" as it adjusts brightness at regular intervals, much in the same way as Samsung TVs do.
Didn't notice a huge difference between 720p and 1080i on Halo 3, but that's because I only had about 10 minutes on it before my malingering XBox finally succumbed to the RROD. Sigh....
4. PS2 via cheap scart.
Chunky resolution on this machine shows a little, but it still looks better than on my CRT, since the horrible pixel crawl is tidied up. Battlefield 2 looks better now than it ever did, although the lack of overall screen resolution on this game makes it look very dated on such a large display.
5. Sound Quality
Is clean, good and loud, offering a rounded performance for music and voice. Much better than on my Techwood.
6. Remote Control + Response
Remote control is cheap and light. It's no Samsung! Very simple to use and buttons don't jam and travel is light. It's 100x better than the Techwood remote control although looks extremely similar. The Techwood buttons have a tendency to jam on the upstroke.
Response to the remote control is also way better than the Techwood and range of the remote is better. The OSD response is about twice as fast, even though it looks like it's clearly a derivative of the Techwood middleware.
What I haven't tried yet:
1. My PS3 via HDMI (will test games + 1080p movie playback)
2. My laptop via VGA (will test 1:1 pixel mapping and generla response)
I'll test these tonight and post back, however my overall experience of this TV so far is that I love it. It's really competent at everything that I've tried so far. I just hope that the HDMI works well, since HDMI on my Dad's Hannspree is terrible; there's a large green horizontal bar at the top of the screen when using a Samsung HD870 upscaling DVD player. For me, that kind of bug would be a deal-breaker.
Everything on this set feels higher-quality than both Techwood and Hannspree. The SD and HD image quality is equivalent to the (1 year old) Samsung 32" we have in the office. The Samsung wins in terms of quality of finish, remote and OSD etc.
That's all for now. Sorry for rambling and I hope it's of use to someone.