LCD TV Reviews

User Interface
The illuminated remote is excellent, one of the best I've seen. The buttons are well-organized, though many are the same size and shape, which is less than ideal. Thank goodness it's not a universal-type remote with the accompanying button clutter and multifunction madness. The illuminated labels on the buttons themselves are sometimes-cryptic icons, with text labels on the body that are not illuminated.

The up/down cursor buttons double as channel up/down, and the left/right buttons also control the volume. This is a common arrangement and probably necessary for a remote this small, but I prefer to have dedicated channel and volume up/down buttons.

Happily, there are individual, dedicated input-selection buttons, which is all too rare on TV remotes and always welcome. (Oddly, there are three HDMI input buttons, but this set has only two HDMI inputs.) There is also an Input button that calls up a list, which lets you select inputs by the labels you give them. Other useful controls include separate buttons for each aspect ratio setting and a button to toggle between the Day and Night backlight modes. (I used the Night mode for my evaluation.)

The manual identifies several buttons as invalid, including Previous Channel, "dash," Guide, and Exit. Granted, this set has no tuner, so there is no need for Previous Channel, "dash" (which would be used to enter DTV sub-channels on the numeric keypad), or Guide, but why include them? For that matter, why include a numeric keypad, which is identified in the manual as being "for tuner operation"? I guess this was done to allow the same remote to be used with tuner-equipped TVs.

Like the remote, the menu system is simple and well-designed. The selected picture control drops to the bottom of the screen while the rest of the menu disappears, which is as it should be. However, the picture control times out after only five seconds of inactivity, which is not enough time to carefully consider your setting.

There are no grayscale calibration controls in the user menu—they reside in the service menu, which is accessed with a special procedure and code. UAV does not publish any such access procedure, which should not be undertaken by end users to avoid wiping out the set's firmware and other nasty consequences.

There is only one set of red, blue, and green calibration controls for each color-temp preset, not two sets as in most TVs. According to NuVision, the gamma is so linear that only one set is needed to dial in the grayscale, but Tom Norton found this not to be entirely true; for more on this, see his comments in the "Setup & Tests" section.