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Native resolution 1366 x 768

How this is supposed to display picture with 1080 lines?

I've had one of these for a few months. Comparing the various TVs in the stores(especially the ones right next to it at circuit city), the Vizio came out ahead of the the other cheap brands. Of couse the Samsungs and Sonys looks great, but were asking a lot more. I was actually surprised at the quality of the upscalar, which is where I've found that most cheap TV skimp, since nearly every LCD TV in the store made a great HD monitor with a good HD source(except for one really cheap generic set). Since I don't have HD cable(HD comes from the media center PC or an upscaling DVD player, or game consoles), a lot of our conetent would be upscaled SD, so one thing I looked at was all those nice HD TVs with regular SD content. Again, the Samsungs, LGs, and Sony's look spectacular, but most of the cheap TVs choked. Aside from the Vizio and one other that I can't remember the brand, they all sharpened the defects to the point that they looked worse than on the similarly sized CRT SD TVs. The last thing that won over the Vizio for me over the other TV with similar price and picture quality was the number of inputs.

When I did my research, these Visio GV line of TV's have the best signal processing of any TV outside of a 400% more Sony Bravia.

I tested normal DVD, vs using a name brand DVD-upscaling player and this TV's own processing was just as good as the upscaling player.

The one thing that kept ME away from LCD/Plasma for so long was the fact that SD content looked like ass on most of them.

But, this Visio handles SD content VERY VERY well and is at least as good as my old tube tv.

Yes it is lame, but standard. TVs are often sold by their accepted INPUT SIGNALs rather than SCREEN RESOLUTION.

The screen is only good for 720p. ANYTHING that does not come in as 720p is scaled (up or down)

A 720p signal on a 720p tv will look crisper and sharper then a 720p signal on a 1080p (general statement, not counting overscan, pixel mapping, etc...)

Hey OSNews is now like Gizmodo, but with more computer stuff. cool

BTW: I grabbed a Sony 40V2500 1080p set yesterday. Very nice on the ps3 and PC

Nice to see they buy an HDTV and throw it in the corner of their living space. Clearly optimal for all to view!

SCART plugs can carry three types of signal (from bad to good) composite, s-video or RGB (four if you include the stereo audio) Most CRT TV with SCART connectors accept RGB on the first input, this gives a very nice quality picture (you can read a computer desktop) and a lot of DVD players, digital sat receivers can be set in the menu to output RGB instead of s-video.

Problem remains that some tv's include only one SCART RGB input and that most computer graphic cards need some tweaking (powerstrip) and a homebrew vga to scart cable to output proper RGB signals.

Some tv's or devices have component video inputs/outputs a red/green/blue connector which is not the same signal as scart with RGB which uses four wires Red, Green Blue and a composite sync instead of Y Pb and Pr

Edited 2008-01-10 10:35 UTC

"HD Ready" and "Full HD" do not (or should not) differentiate between 1366x768 and 1920x1080 panels. They're not even, exactly, alternatives.

"HD Ready" is intended to notify the potential customer that the TV does not contain an HD tuner: i.e., to get an HD picture out of it, you're going to require some other piece of equipment (an HDTV cable box, satellite box, OTA receiver, whatever). You can only sell it as simply an "HDTV" if it can actually receive and display an HDTV (i.e. 720p, 1080i, or higher) signal with no external assistance.

"Full HD" differentiates 1080p from the lower HDTV standards (720p and 1080i). IIRC it was originally one manufacturer's bright idea, but now they all do it. The problem was that simply selling a TV as "1080p" doesn't sound very exciting. Calling it "Full HD" sounds far better, and makes you feel like you're getting something you don't get with a 'lower end' model.

If a TV is 1080p but doesn't have an internal HD tuner, they can call it "Full HD", but I believe it still has to be described as "HD ready" somewhere by the store / manufacturer, otherwise you could probably complain about the inaccurate advertising.

A 1080p panel in a 32" TV is usually a waste. People saying that anything lower than 1080p would be blocky are not taking viewing distances into consideration. That's true of a PC monitor, which you sit about a foot away from. It's not usually true of a TV, which you usually sit much further away from. You can find tons of references if you Google "viewing distances" "HDTV" "1080p" or something like that, but what it boils down to is that if you sit around 6 feet or more away from a 32" TV, 1080p capability is basically pointless. Your eyes are not capable of discerning a difference between 720p and 1080p at that distance.

I have a 42" TV and a viewing distance of around 5.5 feet, so I'm getting some (but not full) benefit from the 1080p resolution of my TV. But if I had bought a 32" TV, I'd've got a 720p panel.

For 720p (1280x720) a 1366x768 screen is just fine. Since most broadcast HDTV here in the US is either 1080i or 720p. Hardly anyone broadcasts 1080p since they can fit two 1080i or 720p stations into the same bandwidth. So for actually watching TV a 1366x768 set is fine, and most game consoles do better at 720p than 1080p anyway. I've been pretty happy with my 32" vizio for gaming, my Wii (480p only admitedly) looks great on it, and the 360 of course looks awesome.

However, for a computer monitor 1366x768 is kind of small, and 32" is kind of large. If you want to go the HDTV as computer monitor route, its probably better to save up and get a 1080p set. I did use mine comfortably as a computer monitor for a few months though, so it is possible if you're feeling poor. Also, the resolution is odd so it can take a little fiddling to get working. I had to browse the nvidia driver documentation to get it working in linux.

If your primary purpose in buying a TV is to watch hd movies, I suppose 1080p is a better option since both formats support it and thats what the movies are encoded for. However, if you're going to be doing that, you're probably going to want larger than 32", and you're also probably going to be spending significantly more than $500 for a TV anyway.

Well, I don't know whether it will ever be sold in Italy or Switzerland, but some people really ought to be careful choosing names for products. Some Italian speakers may think there's something pornographic about it (vizio=vice, perversion) or that there's something broken in it (vizio=defect, fault, flaw). Well, I had to say it, because it had me in stitches.