Step into the TV section of any big-box electronics store, and you're bound to see endless rows of LCD sets lining the shelves. While this surplus of options can make it tough to decide on a specific LCD model, the upside is that the competition for your flat-panel TV dollar has resulted in a number of great deals.
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The Short Form
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| Price $2,500 (list) / olevia.com / 866-965-3842 |
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Snapshot
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| Olevia's no-frills 52-inch LCD delivers decent performance at a modest price. |
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Plus
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•Crisp high-def picture •Can customize picture settings for each input •Affordable price |
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Minus
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•Shadows lack depth and detail in dark scenes •Typical LCD limited viewing angle •Inaccurate skin tones •Below-average standard-def signal upconversion |
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Key Features
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•1080p resolution •Built-in HDTV tuner •Dark, Medium, and Bright Room backlight presets •Zero picture overscan mode •Inputs: 2 HDMI; 2 component-, 2 composite-, and 2 S-video; VGA; RF (air and cable) •51 x 33.75 x 12.75 in; 132.25 lb (w/stand) |
One that you may want to consider when shopping for a big-screen LCD is Olevia's 252T FHD. This 1080p-rez 52-incher, which lists for $2,500 (but sells for considerably less on the Web and elsewhere), offers a lot of screen area for the money. And it lies in the upper half of the company's 2 Series — a line that lacks the high-end video-processing features found in Olevia's high-end 7 Series but nonetheless offers reliable performance for the price.
The 252T FHD has a sleek, classy look that I warmed to immediately. The black bezel surrounding its screen earns points for its textured finish (as opposed to a glossy and mirror-like appearance). Beneath the screen, there's a row of basic control buttons, along with a silvery flange that seems designed to reinforce sound from the TV's built-in speakers. One thing about the 252T FHD that I can't say I appreciated: At 132.25 pounds (with its stand), this is easily the heaviest flat-panel TV I've had to lift in some time — a good 32 pounds heftier the last 52-incher I tested.
When it comes to video inputs, the Olevia isn't overflowing with connections, but there are plenty of jacks to get you started. In addition to two HDMI and two component-video inputs, the TV has a VGA port for plugging in a computer.
The set includes a perfectly functional remote control with a backlit keypad for locating specific buttons in a dark room. That's a good thing, too: A fair number of the remote's buttons are crammed into its bottom half, requiring some effort to locate them. To switch inputs, you repeatedly press the Source button to toggle through all available connections — a frustratingly slow process. And to change display modes (aspect ratios), you locate the Aspect button and cycle through the various options. Choices for high-def programs include Full (16:9) and 1:1 (a direct pixel-map mode with no scaling), along with two zoom modes. And you get two additional options for standard-def programs: Aspect (correctly displays 4:3 programs with black vertical sidebars) and a Panoramic stretch mode.
Setup
Compared with many other current LCD HDTVs, the Olevia has a relatively basic set of features — which means no 120-Hz scanning option, dynamic contrast control, or other fancy things to tweak its picture. The only semi-exotic adjustment is a three-position backlight control with Dark, Medium, and Bright Room presets that can be easily selected via a dedicated button on the remote's keypad. After first choosing the Dark option, I next hit the Menu button to call up the TV's unique rotating onscreen menu system. Scrolling through the picture adjustments, I selected the 6500 color-temperature mode (the only other available mode was one labeled "Native" that made pictures look too bluish) and then adjusted basic settings like contrast, brightness, color, tint, and sharpness.
The set offers a few "Input" presets with names like High-def TV, Standard-def TV, and Progressive DVD, but since I could only find scant information about these in the TV's CD-ROM manual, I chose to steer clear of them. Other items I elected to avoid included the Contrast Enhance, White Peak Limiter, and Black Level Extender options in the Idea submenu. My main reason was that settings of this sort usually don't improve picture quality, but another reason was the manual's curious recommendation that I disable these functions. Consider it done!
One thing I liked about the Olevia's picture adjustments was that the settings could be customized and stored independently for each of the TV's inputs — a huge plus. On the other hand, I was annoyed by the lack of numeric value indicators for the onscreen slider bars. This omission basically means there's no way to record your picture adjustments for later reference if those settings get altered.
Performance
With the Olevia's 6500 color-temperature mode active, colors looked mostly natural, although skin tones did have a somewhat hyped-up quality — an effect that could mostly be seen in close-up shots of faces. For example, in a scene from Spider-Man 3 on Blu-ray Disc where Peter (Tobey Maguire) and Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) chat in her dressing room after a performance, both actors' skin tones displayed a uniform pinkish cast. To check myself here, I watched another scene where Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church) and his wife, Emma (Theresa Russell), argue in her kitchen, and I noted the same lack of skin-tone differentiation and the same lean toward pink.
Overall, however, I found the set's color rendition to be reasonably well balanced. I watched a good amount of high-def sports during my time with the Olevia, including the New York Giants' Super Bowl victory and a few soccer and hockey matches stored on my HD cable box/DVR. For both football and soccer, the turf lining the field was a normal-looking green, as opposed to the more lurid hue I've seen when watching sports on a number of other LCD and plasma sets.
The TV's high-def detail was also excellent. In a Spider-Man 3 scene where Peter and Mary Jane visit their friend Harry (James Franco) in the hospital, the texture of the gauze bandage circling his head came through vividly, and I could even make out fine stitching on his pillowcase.
A key area where the Olevia came up short was in its handling of dark, shadowy images. For instance, in an early scene where Peter watches Mary Jane sing onstage, background shadows in the dim concert hall had a pale, dark-gray appearance — an effect that limited contrast and depleted the picture's overall punch. And in a wide shot that encompassed both the stage and the crowd taking in the performance, any shadow detail that might have fleshed out individual concertgoers and added a sense of depth were instead swallowed up in the general gloom.
Another area where the 252T FHD's performance failed to impress was its video scaling and noise reduction — two essential features for making standard-def programs look good on large, high-def screens. While the Olevia passed the film-detail (3:2 pulldown) test on the Silicon Optix HQV evaluation DVD, it came up short on several other tests from that disc used for checking a TV's scaling abilities. And its various noise-reduction settings proved largely ineffective in smoothing out grainy-looking DVDs and analog cable-TV channels. Uniformity was average for an LCD, with picture contrast falling off steeply at viewing angles greater than 15º off-center, and slight screen clouding was visible on some programs.
Bottom Line
Olevia's 252T FHD isn't the best LCD HDTV I've tested. The set's middling black depth and shadow detail and its so-so video processing cause the TV to pale next to many recent top-shelf LCDs, including those in Olevia's own 7 Series line. What the 252T FHD does have going for it is a crisp high-def picture, rich color, and flexible picture-adjustment options. And then there's the matter of its price: Shop around, and chances are you can score a great deal on a 252T FHD. Just remember to enlist a very strong friend to help you lift it out of the box!
Color temperature (6500 Mode):
20 IRE: 7,152 K
30 IRE: 7,160 K
40 IRE: 7,027 K
50 IRE: 6,934 K
60 IRE: 6,986 K
70 IRE: 6,977 K
80 IRE: 6,757 K
90 IRE: 6,885 K
100 IRE: 6,761 K
Brightness (100-IRE window): 38.3 ftL
| Color | Target X | Measured X | Target Y | Measured Y |
| Red | 0.64 | 0.77 | 0.33 | 0.35 |
| Green | 0.30 | 0.25 | 0.60 | 0.62 |
| Blue | 0.15 | 0.12 | 0.06 | 0.01 |
Of the Olevia's two color-temperature selections, the 6500 mode proved to be the more accurate. Grayscale tracking was ±652 degrees K of the 6,500-K standard from 20 to 100 IRE — below average performance. The set has no user-menu settings for adjusting white balance, and its service-menu adjustments only apply to the component-video inputs. Color-decoder tests showed no errors for both the TV's HDMI and component-video connections. Compared with the SMPTE HD specification, the set's measured red color point indicated a fairly high oversaturation, while its green point showed a bluish bias.
Overscan — the amount of picture area cut off at the edges of the TV's screen — measured 0% for 1080i/p-format high-definition signals with the Screen Crop mode switched to the Off setting. The set displayed 1080i/p and 720p test patterns at full resolution for both HDMI and component-video connections, although slight edge enhancement was visible on the HDMI input. Screen uniformity was fair, with picture contrast falling off substantially at off-axis angles beyond 15º. There was also a slight amount of screen clouding visible on gray full-field test patterns, as well as on regular program material — particularly, video images with large patches of white.
The Olevia failed the film-resolution test on the Silicon Optix HQV high-def test disc, and jaggy picture artifacts were occasionally visible on 1080i-format movies that I watched. Upconversion of standard DVDs proved to be average, although the set's Video Noise Reduction settings weren't very effective at removing noise and grain from less than pristine pictures.
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