Goodmans GTVL 19 W 17 HD

...would not normally entertain a Goodmans product in my home; its just plain wrong. I’m still struck by the stigma of people I knew at school getting a beating when they came in with a Goodmans personal stereo.
When our bedroom TV died a death I knew it was time to head off and have an excuse to spend more money. I have long stated that I prefer the cathode-ray style televisions (the big chunky ones like in olden days) to LCD or Plasma, and ...
...silver sets. This 19 inch Goodmans LCD TV just stood out against all the others, head and shoulders in fact. The best thing still was the price £179.99; so having been swung by its good looks and its price I quickly grabbed one and headed for the door. Having been arrested and agreeing to pay by convincing the police it was a terrible mistake, I was released with a caution but no official charge (if you have a shocked look on your face; that was ... more

Ok let me start by saying I would not normally entertain a Goodmans product in my home; its just plain wrong. I’m still struck by the stigma of people I knew at school getting a beating when they came in with a Goodmans personal stereo.
When our bedroom TV died a death I knew it was time to head off and have an excuse to spend more money. I have long stated that I prefer the cathode-ray style televisions (the big chunky ones like in olden days) to LCD or Plasma, and that nothing could convert me. On a recent shopping trip of all the major electrical retailers I could not find one I liked; but in each store something shiny caught my eye. I returned to the original retailer with it in mind to buy a nasty old style TV as a compromise, but then that thing caught me again. It was like magnetism, I think it was the overall sexiness of the product, it was just like me.

There is stood one black framed (incredibly shiny) against all the boring silver sets. This 19 inch Goodmans LCD TV just stood out against all the others, head and shoulders in fact. The best thing still was the price £179.99; so having been swung by its good looks and its price I quickly grabbed one and headed for the door. Having been arrested and agreeing to pay by convincing the police it was a terrible mistake, I was released with a caution but no official charge (if you have a shocked look on your face; that was meant to be humour).

The set comes with little packaging, which is nice and is really light weight; I would go as far as to say the weight issue is almost non existent, you’d happily carry a dozen of these without feeling any pressure. Installation is simple, a straight forward case of Plug and Play. But this was where I got the shock, in my rush to purchase this sexy product I had not noticed that it came with built in DVD player. I could now have a DVD player and recorder mountain in my house, whatever I seem to do leads to a free DVD player. So from a potential buyer’s point of view this is great, I get the space saving device in what actually is a space saving device itself. This explains the one scart socket I realised, having noticed on the specs in Currys that it only had one socket; on my journey home I had been trying to figure out how I would connect the V+ box and the DVD player to the set without it becoming annoying.

Once switched on the set would go through autotune, but I abandoned this as we don’t have a conventional aerial in the house, all our TV images come from the cable boxes. But I’m pretty sure if you did use a conventional aerial all would be made easy. So having put the scart in the picture automatically heads for the AVI option (this is where most DVD or other external devices sit on a television). With the picture on my TV screen I was ready to play with the other options. One thing I must point out, have you ever walked around a TV shop thinking the images on these small models are not that great for all the world raves about them? I was told by a salesman that this was simply down to brightness and contrast; believe me this is not the case at all; i tried all combinations of brightness, colour, and contrast and; I strongly believe that the picture on my old now deceased LG cathode-ray set was far superior to this. But at the end of the day it’s only for watching about 20 minutes at night before I nod off so its no big deal.

The remote control does not quite match up with the TV’s sexy looks, its like two drinking buddies ones tall and sexy the other fat and disgusting, this remote is disgusting. If you threw it at someone they would be maimed for life. The buttons are quite chunky, which while ideal for those of a certain age or visually impaired really annoyed me. The other annoying aspect was that a lot of the buttons have a dual purpose which you can easily forget about and find yourself instead of using a DVD feature actually turning the TV over, which is very annoying when you’re tired in the dark. The other annoying thing is that in looks it does not seem to be the one that goes with the TV; there is no uniformity between the two products.

The DVD options are straight forward, the discs slot in a little hole at the side of the TV and load up super quick, no sooner had I sat down than the disc was showing on screen. The options work very much the same as a normal DVD player (accepting the annoying issue I explained above), this set up does have a memory so if you need to turn off in a hurry, when you restart your DVD it will play from where you switched off. Also worth a mention is that if you push pause it will stay paused until such time as you want to carry on viewing, unlike most other DVD players that switch off after 5 minutes. The volume level is identical to that of the basic TV volume (providing your using original DVD’s not DVD-R’s) so you don’t need to worry about turning the volume down before switching your DVD off. The other point to mention here I guess is that the DVD player does not want to play all DVD-R’s; this is basically the version of a DVD you make at home with a DVD recorder. While it will play + and – formats it seems very picky about the quality of disc it’s prepared to except. When I first used DVD-R’s I used cheap discs, now I always buy good quality discs, while it will play all those that I make now, all the old ones simply don’t cut it for this machine.

The sound level and quality of the overall product is very good, a nice stereo sound that goes from being as tinny as you like to bassier than you can handle (do you see I’m creating my own language here). I find that a quarter of the way up the volume scale is good enough for me, but when tried at full volume providing your tone and bass are right, the sound does not distort too much.

Ok so here’s the science bit:
Screen format is 16:9 ratio (widescreen); Screen size is 19 inches; The TV is HD Ready (however I am not); Horizontal Pixilation is 1440 (whatever that means); Vertical pixilation is 900; Brightness in Candela is 450; Contrast Ration 500.

Please note this is the Goodmans GTVL 19 W 17 HDVF which comes with built in DVD player only available from Curry’s brand stores and their associates. This should not confused with the Goodmans GTVL 19 W 17 HD which is more commonly seen in stores and similar with a few lesser exception (also its cheaper).

Overall I’m very pleased with this straightforward TV, with the odd glitch it’s become an excepted and not unloved member of the household. And I’d certainly think twice before dismissing a product again because it bore the Goodmans label. 

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