HDTV Reviews

Syntax-Brillian Olevia will be a brand you are familiar with if you shop at Amazon and buy.com but not the highstreet. They are priced much cheaper than the main HDTV players, but can they complete? BigpictureBigSound has a review of the Olevia 542 and say, in terms of connectivity, the 542i has all the inputs you’d expect plus one or two you might not. It includes 1 HDMI A/V input (with HDCP), 2 component video, 2 composite, 2 S-video and a VGA port which you can also use (via an adapter) as a third component video input. I’d have liked to see a second HDMI input, but if you have a home theater receiver or external video scaler with HDMI-switching then this will not be necessary.

Over time, the things that bothered me about the 542i bothered me less while the things I liked, I continued to like. The idiosyncratic set-up menu became easier to navigate with experience and the lack of numeric values in the picture settings was only really problematic during calibration. HDTV programming (particularly HD-DVD titles) looked crisp and clean, and standard definition programming was, for the most part, eminently watchable, particularly with adjustments to the noise reduction setting. But the best thing going for it is the price. With Olevia’s aggressive pricing, more and more people will be able to experience the joys of true widescreen high definition television at home, and that is, after all, a very good thing.