JVC LT-26DX7 - 26" LCD HDTV

Introduction and First Looks

The JVC LT-26DX7B is, unsurprisingly, a 26-inch HDTV. It's from JVC's "InteriArt" range and is available on the web for around £700. I can imagine that this one will make its way onto many a shopper's list of potentials, simply because it features two HDMI inputs - something of a rarity on smaller screen sizes.

Looks-wise, it features the now-popular "piano black" plastic surrounding the viewing area, behind which there's a subtle glittery pattern. I'm not the biggest fan of this gloss-black, because I simply don't like the appearance, and tend to find the added reflections more trouble than they're worth when you look at the TV outside the world of perfectly-produced promotional photos. No huge worries here though, because the appearance isn't too jarring and the border is small.



Below this, there's two speaker grilles that are placed further back. In the middle of this recessed strip, there's a green power LED and above this, a fluorescent blue LED that casts a neat blue light effect onto the "JVC" logo below. Don't worry if these little design quirks would irritate you - you can turn both of them off via the TV's menus.



The LT-26DX7B is a fairly nice looking HDTV, but it does come across as a little "boxy". It doesn't show from pictures, but when you're viewing it front-on, the recessed speaker grille strip gives the TV a sort of "beveled" look. The resulting sharp corners might give it a slightly jarring look in some people's eyes. That said, it's no eyesore either and nothing about its design stands out as being particularly objectionable.

Remote Control

The LT-26DX7B comes with a silver remote that's impressively thin, and also light. It draws power from two AAA-size batteries which fit neatly into the back. On top of this, it also has three other modes for controlling other devices such as a VCR and DVD player. These are conveniently toggled via the accompanying "MODE" button.

One annoying feature about the LT-26DX7B's remote however, is that the Volume and Channel buttons are placed around the directional pad. I presume JVC did this so that we wouldn't have to move our thumbs too far when making adjustments. I found this a little cumbersome because since the Volume and Channel buttons are so near to the said pad, it takes a little bit of careful finger-work before you finally manage to stop knocking the Volume buttons when you're tweaking the picture.

The remote also has a "ZOOM" button which controls the Aspect Ratio, a button to bring up the Programme Guide for digital TV, and also, a button to turn Subtitles (again for Digital TV) on and off, which is a most welcome feature (and one that was missing from the last HDTV I reviewed). Most, but not all of the other buttons at the bottom of the remote, relate to analogue Teletext and the Picture In Picture mode.

All in all, there is room for improvement when it comes to the remote. Leaving the Volume and Channel buttons near to the directional pad is in my opinion a mistake, and on top of this, the pad feels a little unresponsive and could recess a little more for more comfy operation. Thumbs up to JVC for including a subtitle button on the remote, though. I imagine it's simply a matter of getting used to it.

Picture Tweaks

And now, on to the one of the most important parts - the control the user is given over the video that appears on-screen.


This HDTV offers all of the most important adjustments including control of backlight, which is curiously labelled as "Bright-1". "Bright-2" gives the standard Brightness control that we all know and love.

The fact that the Backlight on this TV is adjustable means that when you take it home and out of that dazzlingly lit shop floor, you can tone down the overall light output to a more earthly level. Some LCD TVs still don't give you this option, which is close to a necessity on an LCD display. I found that turning the backlight down almost to its lowest value gave the best results, with the higher end being unpleasant to look at (and this was during the daytime). Well done to JVC for offering this adjustment - there are higher-end LCDs that actually don't have it!

While the backlight can be adjusted though, I still found myself wishing I could drop it even lower for more realistic black levels.

In addition to the standard tweaks, there's three picture memories for each input (called "Bright", "Standard" and "Soft"), which means the TV is capable of storing a wide range of picture presets. Unlike some other LCD TVs, all of the features are adjustable on every memory mode - you can, for example, make the "Bright" mode look as dull as you want. The TV never forces any unwanted picture adjustments on the viewer, which is excellent.


Tucked away in the "Features" menu are some of the usual gimmick features, as well as some genuinely important ones. "4:3 Auto Aspect" gives the user the option of either distorting non-widescreen video to fill the 16:9 panel, or to present it pillarboxed (with black borders at either side).

"Movie Theatre" appears to be this TV's name for manual control of the Pulldown Detection (which recreates clear frames from interlaced films, like a DVD player connected via an interlaced input like SCART, or a film being shown on TV). Toggling it doesn't actually present a huge difference in motion quality, because even Off there's very little sign of Combing or jaggies from interlaced film content. Although it's best left on Auto (so that it'll work its magic when necessary), motion processing from my DVD player connected via 480i and 576i over Component was consistently excellent with or without "Movie Theatre" enabled. I imagine that most people will be using a Progressive Scan DVD player however, which will effectively bypass this option. For those still using the SCART connection, the handling of interlaced content is sure to please.

The other video tweaks in this menu are simply gimmicks. "Super DigiPure" seems to use a combination of noise reduction algorithms and tends to result in lessened picture detail and motion blurring. The result is a strange sort of underwater, motion blurred effect - almost like you're looking through wet glass - and it's best left off. It might be useful on particularly bad quality material, though.

"Colour Management": from its name, I was expecting this to bring up a menu allowing me to fine-tune the intensity of individual Red, Green and Blue picture elements. Instead, it's a simple On/Off toggle that only serves to selectively increase the saturation of colours. "Picture Management" is much the same, as it adjusts the contrast slightly to try and fake a "richer" picture. "Smart Picture" promises to alter the shade of white areas, but again, I couldn't see any difference most of the time. MPEG Noise Reduction does exactly what it says and selectively erodes the image very, very slightly to hide MPEG noise. The effect is incredibly subtle and as a result, not too dangerous (that is, it won't chomp through much detail if you choose to use it for your digital TV viewing).

To conclude, the LT-26DX7B offers all of the essential picture tweaks, including the all-important adjustment of the backlight. The moderate amount of non-thrilling tweaks is nothing new in the competitive LCD market so users shouldn't be put off by these. That said, I would appreciate an option in here to adjust the Gamma, for further picture refinement.

Video Performance

As with seemingly every LCD TV available, the TV defaults to what some AV experts have affectionately named "Flame Mode" when it's first turned on. That is, the default picture settings have exaggerated brightness, contrast, sharpness, and colour that's sky-high, so the picture looks almost like it's on fire. Fortunately, a few minutes of tweaking clears things up considerably. Sadly, some objectionable flaws still remain even after tweaking which are cause for concern.

Testing the TV with a Panasonic DVD-S97 - an upscaling DVD player that uses a Faroudja chipset for its picture enhancing work - produced results that were excellent, with the exception of one flaw which I'll discuss soon.

9/10 and 10/10 quality transfers (of which there are sadly few in the DVD world) produced the excellent results you'd expect. The flawless PAL version of "The Incredibles" brings out the best in just about any display, and the LT-26DX7B is no exception to this trend. Similarly, the excellent NTSC Criterion Collection version of "The Rock" shows off the detail the TV is capable of producing. I didn't see any ringing, halos, or obnoxious oversharpening on any video input that I tested which is excellent. I also tested the LT-26DX7 with Toshiba's American HD-DVD player, the HD-A1, and was very happy with the image quality.


Unfortunately, during testing the HDMI input, I found a slight problem that might rear its head for some people. On 720p and 1080i modes via HDMI at 50hz, I noted that red shades were shifted out of the lines, to the left. This was especially noticeable on the red "WARNING" text on DVD copyright warning screens, but of course, will affect any red in the image. Notice how in the example below, the right edges of affected objects take on a greenish/grey tint because of the colours being misaligned. This is a very noticeable error if you watch animation or other types of video that tend to have a more vivid appearance.



It's strange that the colours are misaligned on 50hz (European standard) HDTV modes, but not US and Japanese-centric 60hz ones. Comparing an American DVD and a European disc of the same film one after the other, allowed us to pinpoint this. Unfortunately, SKY HD broadcasts are in 50hz, so will be affected. I'll say it once and I'll say it again - the people in charge of putting these together need to watch more cartoons to catch problems like these!

Component Video, the next best connection choice, looked excellent too, but once again, was not without its quirks. First of all, I tried my US Xbox (original version) running in 480p. A few online games of Halo 2 showed that the LT-26DX7B could show even less detailed video signals such as those put out by the Xbox, as well as it possibly could. Meanwhile, the 480p video output from the Japanese/American Nintendo GameCube - still the best looking 480p device I've seen - showed that when fed with the right signal, the Component video performance from this TV can be exceptional: rich, detailed, and almost 3D.

I should add however, that when testing the game "Super Smash Bros. Melee", being a video geek I noticed one strange colour shift issue. Look carefully to the right of the moustache in the picture below and notice how the black from it seems to be carrying over to the right. Let's hope that this odd problem doesn't often appear.


There's also another colour-related problem that crops up whenever you're feeding this TV via using Component, S-Video, or Composite signal types. Playing animated DVDs via 576i over Component, I noticed that large areas of specific colours sometimes left strange motion trails. At first, I blamed the LCD panel itself, but the fact that the effect is greatly reduced when feeding the TV Progressive video - and gone completely when using digital video over HDMI - means that problem is with the image processing and not a liquid crystal problem. Even with all of the advanced picture tweaks turned off, strong colours occasionally left brief but noticeable motion blurs of themselves.

It looks like there's some sort of noise reduction that acts on the colour component of the picture that's going badly wrong, and can't be disabled. Sadly, this means that this TV probably won't appeal to you much at all if you like a lot of animation. It could easily pop up on live action video too, though.

Dropping down a notch on the picture quality scale to RGB via SCART, the quality was among the best I've seen for this type of video. The quality here surprised me because normally I tell people that a progressive scan DVD player is a must on an LCD. Here, you could actually get away with using RGB SCART and be pretty happy with it - especially when you consider that the strange "colour trails" problem doesn't appear using RGB SCART.

Down again to S-Video, and the "colour trails" are back. If these were fixed, then the S-Video performance would be very good - nearly comparable to RGB over SCART, but with the obvious limitations of the signal type (that is, slightly lower colour resolution).

Finally, old fashioned Composite video, probably the hardest type of video for any display device to work with (and fortunately, the one with the fewest legitimate uses). The results once again were good, and although the Comb filtering (dot crawl removal) wasn't outstanding for PAL video, it was perfectly acceptable given how few uses Composite video has these days (and as usual, the dot crawl removal was a lot better for NTSC signals). The colour trails issue was also at its most severe here.

Finally, the scaling on this TV - that is, the resizing of video to fit the number of pixels on the LCD panel - is very good. Only at close range were some slight deficencies JUST visible (and I'm talking pixel sized ones, nothing major). The scaling is very good overall.



DVDs like "Monsters Inc." can look great - this particular screen shot avoids the colour shift error.
Sadly, although the TV is capable of eye-poppingly good images - such as those from an imported US games console running at 480p (or a domestic Xbox 360) - every video type has at least one flaw which to me suggests the people in charge of creating the video processing hardware didn't test it out with a wide enough variety of sources. 50hz HDMI has its colour shift, and nearly all of the other video types show strange coloured trails that seem to be a result of overprocessing and not the LCD panel itself like you might think. Curiously, RGB over SCART gets off with the fewest problems.

In this regard, the LT-26DX7 comes very close to being a very good performer but due to a lack of attention to detail, has several flaws that may or may not become obvious to you.

Deinterlacer Torture Test

Interlacing is the screen drawing method that is native to most old CRT TVs. Unlike these, an LCD panel is Progressive, not interlaced. This means that the Deinterlacer needs to convert what would otherwise appear as a collection of jagged "combing" patterns into a natural, watchable picture.

Using my favourite workout for any deinterlacer, a fast (60 frames per second) video game called Sonic Adventure DX on the Nintendo GameCube, I was incredibly impressed by the results. Combing artefacts slipped through in only the tiniest screen areas, and even these were rare. I'm sure the smaller screen size helped to conceal any errors, but even still, up close there were almost none to be found. The LT-26DX7 is very impressive in this regard.

As I touched on earlier when discussing the "Movie Theatre" option, handling of Interlaced films is also brilliant. Any jaggies that do appear are minimal. However, I expect that most people will now be using a Progressive Scan DVD player connected via Component or HDMI, which will mean that the TV's impressive Deinterlacing won't have to be put into action.

HDTV Performance

Taking into account the fact that 50hz HD pictures suffer from colour misalignment, it's hard to recommend this TV for potential SKY HD customers. All the same, high definition picture detail was good, and I was pleased to see that this TV didn't resort to crude "Bob" deinterlacing techniques for its handling of 1080i video. Instead, it appears to use some sort of motion adaptive processing, which is great to see. I was extremely impressed to see that when I played a 1080i upscaled video game with repetitive flashing patterns, close to no combing artefacts were allowed to slip through. The deinterlacing performance is very good indeed.

Standard definition Digital TV and "Freeview"

The Digital TV performance on this display is impressive. Although the integrated DVB (digital) tuner is not the fastest to respond for channel changes out of the LCD TVs I've used, the TV does a good job when it comes to picture quality, which is the main thing. MPEG blocking was of course present, but lowering the Sharpness control allowed for impressive results which meant that picture imperfections were not exaggerated.

The LT-26DX7 also features a card slot, so you can subscribe to Top-Up TV if you wish.



The LT-26DX7 is capable of letting even ropey-looking digital TV sources off lightly.
On the next page, I wrap up by discussing the LT-26DX7's PC Input capabilities, the quality of the LCD panel itself, the Digital TV Electronic Programme Guide, Sound, and Connectivity.

PC Input

The PC input on this TV is fairly suitable for playing back high definition sample clips and playing computer games, but do not expect to use it for text-heavy content. The only officially supported resolution is a rather dated and limiting 640x480 (at the usual 60hz only) - which isn't totally without use, because connecting a Sega Dreamcast outputting at this resolution gave impressive results.

I did manage to get a picture visible with 1024x768, 1280x768, and 1366x768 resolutions. Strangely, although 1366x768 displayed, it didn't appear to be 1:1 scaled as the image was not pixel-perfect and had clear artefacts around text. However, as JVC specifically stated themselves that 640x480 is the only supported resolution, I will not take this into account for the final score. That said, adding a VGA input in the first place would suggest that some attempt has been made at PC compatibility - it just seems odd that it's limited enough to mean it can't actually be used properly with modern computers!

The LCD Panel itself

Compared to most other 26" displays, the panel holds up well. Motion smearing is definitely visible on fast, colourful video games (Super Mario World shows up trails, especially on its thick black outlines), however the response time is adequate for TV and film usage. A World Cup football game on BBC One did not present any unacceptable motion issues, so the panel is reasonable in this regard.

After sampling new S-PVA panels fitted to some other LCD TVs, the black levels appeared acceptable but definitely not jaw dropping. Of course, S-PVA panels aren't made in the 26" size, so I suppose this is now a limitation of smaller screen sizes. I'd actually appreciate being able to drop the backlight (the "Bright-1" picture setting) lower than is currently allowed to ease the blacks a little, especially for watching in darker conditions.

Digital tuner usability

Pressing the "GUIDE" button on the remote brings up an Electronic Programme Guide. The designers have come up with a novel idea - showing a linear listing of programmes showing on a selected channel. By this, I mean showing a list of programmes and starting times each on their own line, rather than the usual "Programme Grid" view seen on other TVs.


This is all well and good, but the EPG's usability is hampered somewhat by the length of time it takes to actually select a new channel. It seems to me that the TV is actually switching channels "in the background" to gather the necessary schedule information, rather than grabbing it all in one chunk and storing it in memory for later use (although that hunch of mine could be wrong). Whatever's going on, I wished it could be a bit faster.

Stranger still was the fact that I could find no way to actually jump to a channel via the EPG. If you see programme currently showing that tickles your fancy, rather than pressing a button to tune to the appropriate channel, you need to press BACK to exit the EPG and manually key in the channel number.

In addition to these usability issues, there's the issue where pressing one of the remote's number buttons when viewing one of the video inputs, actually takes you back to analogue TV. I don't use analogue TV at all so found this a strange oversight. I'd appreciate it if the TV would remember the last TV mode used and take me back to that instead. Watching digital TV requires you to press the "TV/DTV" button which is strange considering that Analogue switch-off begins in the next couple of years. Fortunately, once you're in DTV mode, the number buttons act as expected.

The digital TV functionality allows you to order channels, and also rename them.

Other convenient features and usability

The "Set Up" menu is home to a nifty little feature called "EXT Setting". This remarkably user-friendly screen lets you configure exactly what sort of signals are going in, and out, of the video sockets - including the bidirectional SCART sockets.

In addition to this, it lets you assign preset labels (such as DVD, GAME and STB) to the inputs. I was glad to see that the option to instruct the TV that an S-Video signal was being fed to the SCART sockets was present. A lot of other TVs simply assume that you're going to feed a SCART socket Composite or RGB pictures, which means that connecting an S-Video device on these TVs will result in a black and white picture. Not so here.

I also noted that using both the remote and the TV's side-mounted navigation buttons, there was at least a second's delay in selecting menu options. It's not a huge deal, but it'll make tweaking to get the ideal picture take that little bit longer.

Sound and Built-in Speakers

I was pleasantly surprised by the speakers built into this TV. They're highly adequate, and we're allowed to control the Bass and Treble to produce a surprisingly punchy sound.

The LT-26DX7 also features two audio outputs that provide fixed audio direct from the device, unaffected by any Bass/Treble sound adjustments you've made in the TV's menu, or any volume changes you make with the remote, so you can easily connect it to a hi-fi or other speaker system.

Connectivity

Compared to other European LCD TVs, connectivity is one of this screen's strong points. Most notable is the fact that it includes two HDMI ports - meaning that connecting an HDTV receiver as well as a next generation HD video disc player (be it HD-DVD or Blu-Ray - place your bets now, folks) is possible. It's very, very impressive to see a feature like this, especially on a smaller screen such as this. Smaller screens tend to be neglected when it comes to multiple high quality video inputs and it's good to see JVC haven't fallen into that trap.

Like every other European LCD TV below 40 inches, this features only one Component video input, so if you plan to use an Xbox 360 alongside a next-gen Nintendo console or with a Component DVD player, you'll need a switchbox. It's really annoying that European arms of electronics companies are yet to give us two sets of Component jacks on the most common TV sizes - the consumer need is here, but it seems that manufacturer common sense is not! I need to stress this is not a JVC-specific issue but is sadly the norm here in the "Old World". Does that make it any less annoying? Unfortunately not.

Two SCART sockets, both supporting Interlaced RGB video, will be of use to some people, but I'm not sure why companies in Europe insist on adding two of these rather than one on an HD display. European divisions of companies should be putting more emphasis on providing multiple Component inputs rather than the outdated SCART connectors - or at the very least allow us to feed a Component signal in through a SCART terminal so those of us with high quality video devices aren't limited quality-wise.

Closing thoughts

JVC are facing some seriously stiff competition in the LCD TV business. At its cheapest, this TV can be hard for around £720 mark. That is certainly an impressive price for an HDTV, but for slightly less money it's possible to pick up 26" screens from competitors that are free from the colour problems exhibited here.

Without these faults, the JVC would be a TV with very good video processing and deinterlacing, and by European HDTV standards, excellent connectivity. It's let down slightly by DTV usability issues.

Sadly, as it stands, the colour smearing and shift issues are too evident for me to recommend it if you have highly sensitive eyes - especially with unaffected LCDs from other manufacturers available at similar (or cheaper) prices. This is a real shame when you consider the LT-26DX7's many benefits - the 2 HDMI inputs, again, being the most obvious.

Non-video geeks will probably be pleased with the knowledge that the 2 HDMI inputs offer a good amount of future-proofing, but those with sensitive eyes - such as myself, and I must stress that part - are probably better looking at the competition instead. I hope that JVC come up with a solution for the image problems I've mentioned in this review (I've made them aware of them) - if, or when they do, I'll be more than happy to re-evaluate this TV - because to be totally honest, I thought I'd like it more than I did.