Polaroid FLU-2632

...and lay eyes on the Polaroid FLU2632 26" LCD TV that I thought there might be hope. The first thing that appealed to me was the price of the television; it was on sale in a special offer for only 349 pounds. This price is very, very low for what the television is. I was looking at 20" screens, that had less than half of the features for the same price and was unimpressed by them, now I had found my TV.

My only challenge now ...
...TV wasn't actually made by Polaroid made me worry even more. Most of these worries were in vain however, as I am very happy with my TV setup right now.

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Ease of Use
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Upon receiving the box the first thing I noticed was how big it was. This is because of the meticulous ... more

I had long deliberated about which kind of television to buy for my room: a teenager with little money, but with a burning desire to buy something over the top with my Christmas money. I had initially thought about just buying a normal TV, as I reckoned I would get the biggest TV for my money with the best picture quality, and so I went on a search. That was my first misconception.

Looking at the many hundreds of bog-standard TVs in Tesco's and Comet, I started to lose hope. Only then was it that I ventured into PC World and lay eyes on the Polaroid FLU2632 26" LCD TV that I thought there might be hope. The first thing that appealed to me was the price of the television; it was on sale in a special offer for only 349 pounds. This price is very, very low for what the television is. I was looking at 20" screens, that had less than half of the features for the same price and was unimpressed by them, now I had found my TV.

My only challenge now was to actually purchase the TV, which was a lot harder than you might think. PC World's employees have a habit of ignoring all potential customers, even when they stand in front of the telly for about half an hour trying to look as interested as they can in order to get a salesperson's attention. Eventually I had to go up to a rather lost looking sales assistant with a vacant look on his face and ask him if I could buy the TV. Things should have got better after that: they didn't. The man tried as hard as he could to discourage me from ordering one, using such brilliant sales patter as, "Well, ye see, I dinnae ken if were gettin' onymore a thae tellys in, I mean we might no ever have any, ever again." Then he looked at me with a look that said, "now go home". Thankfully, my dad being as irate as he is, managed to talk to the manager, and he got everything sorted out for me. If anyone is thinking of buying this television, I urge them not to try and buy it from PC World, It's more trouble than it's worth.

All that remained after the ordeal of ordering the telly was the anticipation of waiting for the order to arrive, and it did, just on time. In the meantime, while I was waiting for it to arrive, I was researching it on the internet to see just what other people thought about it. I noticed that there were almost no reviews on the telly, so I was a little apprehensive about it, and an article I read about the use of the 'Polaroid' name where the TV wasn't actually made by Polaroid made me worry even more. Most of these worries were in vain however, as I am very happy with my TV setup right now.

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Ease of Use
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Upon receiving the box the first thing I noticed was how big it was. This is because of the meticulous way everything is packed and padded, and the amount of stuff in there. The manual is the first thing out, and it is very clear. It gives you detailed step-by-step instructions for how to get the TV up and running: everything you could want to ask of it, from how to install the stand to diagrams of aerial configurations are included. I think that the way they go through each of the features of the telly; even suggest what could be used with what connection and explain what some of the jargon means in layman's terms is a really nice touch.

For some reason I had expected such a cheap TV to skimp on the explanations, but everything was as clear-cut and concise as you could hope for, with such intimidating new technology. Once you have connected up the TV to your Freeview box or aerial or whatever, tweaking the picture quality is very intuitive, and you are given quite a lot to work with. Each adjustment of picture quality is saved onto the particular input, which is very handy, as most different sources have slightly different signals and it can be a pain to have to reconfigure your telly every time you want to change the inputs (watch a DVD etc.). The sound settings are easy to use, albeit a little gimmicky and the extra bits such as Picture in Picture are all well and good, if a little useless (actually I can't think of a situation where you would ever use them, but they are there, regardless). The remote control is big, but not had to use, and it's all very easy to get used to .
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Connections
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One of the most important things to think about when buying a new telly is its connectivity: what use is a new television if it wont play your new HD DVDs, or your old VCR? This television, I was pleased to discover, has more inputs than you should ever really need. Of course, I had to stick my head round the back of the display stand in PC World to find that out, but ill let my grudges go… for now.

There are 2 scart inputs, so old fashioned VCRs and the like will not be lying redundant in a heap, and this is quite rare on LCD TVs. There are also a pair of composite video inputs, so if you do run out of scart sockets, just use one of those adapter things, and if you have a playstation for example, you can plug it into the input at the side of the telly for easy access. The TV has a component video input, so that better quality from Xbox 360s or DVD players, or any other things with a high-definition output but not an HDMI cable. And speaking of HDMI connectivity, there are TWO of them in the back, this means that the telly is definitely set for the future in terms of creating a decent setup for HD games and films. There is also a VGA input, which I don't plan to use, but it could be good for people who want to scare others by having their PCs being connected to the telly. All of these inputs are layed out very thoughtfully, they are hard to see when you are leaning over the TV, so Polaroid have combatted this with a nice big sticker underneath, showing you exactly where to put your inputs; it means the end of fumbling around, bending pins and then falling over onto you precious new TV.

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S ound Quality/Features
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To be honest the sound out of this TV is a bit of a letdown. You can't really expect much from such a thin TV (less than 20 cm), but it does affect the experience of viewing a bit. I was thankful to remember then, that there is also an audio out from the back, with the standard L and R component cable red and white plugs. I was then a little less than thankful to discover that the sound did not then play through my Hi-Fi. I couldn't find out what the problem was, although I'm sure it's nothing major, and if you are that bothered about it, you can just link up whatever connection you are using to your hi-fi directly, which is what I'm doing with freeview at them moment. It might be a bit of a kick in the teeth if I ever get something with an HDMI output, but meh.

There does come with the set a lot of cables, including two composite video cables with L and R audio, a component video set of cables and also some plugs that will enable you to power it up in other parts of the world, probably more through laziness than anything else. The features I found to be a bit gimmicky, but then I never really understood what you were meant to do with them, the PiP and PoP and teletext on mine don't get used, but its easy to use them, so that's a plus. The TV has a headphone socket that is pretty handy if you are watching TV up late and don't want to waken the parents; quite a good quality through my sennheisers.
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Picture Quality
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This is the big test for any television; there would be no use for any of the fancy features if the picture looked like a coffee-stained smuge. Thankfully it doesn't.

When I saw the display in the shop, up against all of the other screens, it was pretty hard to tell the difference between it and the surrounding units that were about twice the price. The way that they display them, in any shop, is always a misrepresentation of what the picture can look like, as they had the brightness, contrast and saturation maxed, making it a bit of a strain on the eyes to look at. To be honest, at first I wasn't super impressed by it: it looked a lot nicer than any of the smaller, more blurry screens I had been staring at before, but nothing that special. It was only when I had got it home and adjusted it to my settings that I could fully appreciate it.

I run a SD signal from a digital freeview box, and as such, the picture quality up close is not as good as that of say a high-end SD TV, this is true of almost all high definition TVs, and is a fact of life. When you view the telly from a bit further back however, the picture comes to life. The digitalisation around the edges of words is barely noticeable once you are at a normal viewing distance, where you can start to appreciate the quality of the display.

The whites are very bright, and the colours vivid. The first thing that came on the screen was a darts championship, when I first plugged in the aerial, and I have never enjoyed darts but watched just because the reds and greens stood out so much. The colours were impressive enough to me, a long time owner of CRT TVs, which is the same boat that most people will be in that will be considering buying it. Yes, the Sonys may have bouncy balls that fly down a hill, but that tv also costs more than twice as much for one the same size, and the difference between the colours is very small, especially to the casual TV watcher. The colours could be tweaked to lpersonal preference as well, with an automatic hue control, and even a separate RGB adjustment that really helped me get the picture I wanted (turning down the red made a dramatic improvement).

The high definition picture is very nice, the LCD screen is the ideal choice for gamers and the 720p resolution is great-looking from the Xbox360 when plugged into the component input. With careful adjustment the screen performs very nicely, very little streaking of fast-moving things, and turning the sharpness up helps a bit as well. It's not the same quality as some of the higher spec. LCDs, but for 349 quid, nothing can touch it.
One thing I am a little sceptical about is Polaroid's claim of a '6.5ms response time', purely because it sounds too good to be true, and if it did have this kind of a response time, it's picture would be rivalling those top-spec sonys etc. What I think the likely explanation of this is that Polaroid measure their response times in different ways to the most prestigious manufacturers, so that the time would be longer. This little piece of information will probably mean little to most people just looking for a telly, but I think it is an important point to note that manufacturers can make claims that aren't comparable between TVs due to the twisting of their figures. Nonetheless, the picture looks great for normal viewing, watching Planet Earth on it was pretty fantastic for example.

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Overall
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I think this television is definitely the right choice for a bedroom, it is very compact, big enough to be impressive and looks stylish. The black outer casing fits nicely with my room's décor, in my opinion the black edge looks a lot better than the silver fad, which is going out of fashion.

This TV is surprisingly durable, the stand is very steady and it looks built to last, I have not owned it long enough to be able to comment properly on its longevity or Polaroid's customer service, but it comes with a one-year warranty that covers faults and I have a protection plan on it, so I feel pretty reassured.

Getting an LCD of this size at this price is a fantastic deal, not to mention that it is also properly HD ready! This television is definitely one of the best choices you can make if you are looking for a budget television and should provide much entertainment, unless you are that fixated on getting the best quality TV around, in which case you would be looking for something a lot more expensive; disproportionally so. An ideal secondary, budget LCD TV.

***EDIT***

After owning this TV for a longer time, I thought it would be useful if I offered solutions to the few problems that the telly has.

In regards to the tinny sound, this is no real problem if you have a hi-fi with L and R audio inputs at the back like me, but if you really can't find a way round it then I find the headphone jack has a much better sound. You can use this jack as an output to your tape player by buying on of those mp3 to tape converters, which means that you are not restricted to just using L and R audio jack inclusive devices, but can play anything and just get the output from the headphone socket for better sound quality.

This results in a little tape background noise, but it's a small price to pay for getting much better sound quality out of a TV with a great picture at such a small price.

If you don't even have a tape player then you can set the bass to maximum and the treble to minimum and put the sound mode on 'dance' to get an almost passable semblance of quality.

If you are using a PS2 with the television then it is a good investment to buy a ps2 componenet cable, as this improves the quality dramatically. The picture is now even better than it was before.

If I find anything else that I can recommend doing relating to this TV then I will update this review in the future. 

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