Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

It's okay. First and foremost, it's okay. Do not let this deter you from getting this TV. For the price you pay, it's a lot of value and should be treated as such. 90% of the people 90% of the time will look favorably on this TV, not because of how amazing it is, but for how amazing it is for the money you paid. Don't deny it, the reason you're reading these reviews is because you know there MUST be something wrong with this TV for it to be so big and relatively cheap, but you want to know if these yet known flaws outweigh your desire for a big cheap TV or keep you from enjoying it later down the road as your use of it evolves. It's a great TV. Not just for the money, but in general, it is a great TV for the sake of TV. Assuming of course all your delivered content is at 24 frames per second. You can stop reading and buy it now. You want to know more about what is so good about it? Fine, I'll divulge a bit. It has tons of connections. More than I honestly need and will use. It even has VGA so you can use a older PC with it. I'm using Radeon graphics (HD 7870) and have this television hooked up through the HDMI and didn't have to do much at all to get the picture correct and clear, so the connections work well. I've had other (older) LCD TVs require me to dig deep into their settings before I could get them to recognize and display the PC output correctly. I'm not sure how most newer TVs handle that, but this one does it automatically and great. Just be sure to set the Picture setting to "Full 100%" display mode and the picture will fill the screen properly. The stand works properly and allows the TV to pivot so you can get behind it to connect more things. I love that. The power cord is adequately long. Unlike a few reviewers, all of my HDMI ports work. Most people should check all the ports and features of any electronic, name brand or otherwise, to be sure there is no defects. And lucky me, mine is dandy. It's thin and light, it doesn't use a huge amount of power, in fact, before you mess with the picture settings, it starts out with Power Savings mode. Cranking up the brightness will turn up the power usage, but not be a huge amount, in fact I measure it to be only a few extra watts on static images. The sound works well for what it is, it's no home theatre system, but if you're buying a sub-$500 TV, you probably don't care about amazing sound. It's okay, and there is nothing wrong with that. I personally turned the treble up a bit to make voices more distinct and clear. So it's nice. You can buy it now, it's okay, you know you want it. Still here? You want to know why this review isn't 5 out of 5? Didn't you see everyone else review this thing's amazing display and adequate sound? Fine, I'll tell you my problems with this television, but they won't apply to a lot of you out there so they're not exactly realistic reasons to keep most of you for enjoying this great bargain product. It's the display. I see it in several other reviews. This TV has a GREAT display. They can't believe how good it is, especially for the money. It's got great clarity! It's nice! The colors are so vivid! Sure. Until you hook it up as a PC display. Then you open up a website. Let's say amazon.com. Then you scroll down. Then you see it. THE GHOSTING (dun dun dun?) Ghosting is basically after images from poor response times from the screen or from bad analog signals. Basically, the pixels don't change color fast enough from one color to another and you see a sort of afterimage. This display has TONS of it. Almost all of it from white to another color. It's most noticeable when are scrolling down webpages with black text and multicolored images on white backgrounds. It's not just black, it's reds, pinks, oranges, and browns that leave these trails too. All easily noticeable from 15ft away. Maybe more, but I don't have the space to test it. Blues, greens and yellows are less noticeable, you have to be within 5ft of the screen to notice them and really look for it. Also, skinny black text on a white background seems to have faint yellow highlights, which bugs my eyes quite a lot. I even brought other people in and asked them, "Do you see some of this faint yellow around some of these letters, or am I just crazy?" I got a resounding yes from my volunteers (to seeing the yellow, not to my being crazy). This doesn't happen with thicker, larger or bold text. Most videos on the internet run lower than 30fps to save bandwidth, so Netflix and Hulu are going to display just fine on this TV. I mean, the ghosting is still there, it's just less apparent. I only noticed it when watching vlogs with people with dark rimmed glasses and pasty white faces moved their heads a lot. I doubt you're going to care about a little text and picture trails if you're checking facebook or trolling some forums, this isn't a deal breaker for lot of people. But not me, I like to game on my PC and use Steam's Big Picture Mode. Anything running faster than 24 fps with lots of contrasting color is going to have ghosting and you WILL notice it. An extreme case of this would be Guacamelee. I love that game. It is lots of solid colors and little shading or light effects. There are many portions of the game where your main character will be running quickly against a light background where the ghosting will be VERY apparent. Military shooters with bright skies and lots of cinematic lens flare have tons of ghosting too and motion blur will becomes mildly exaggerated. "We get it, you play games, it's not perfect, so what?" It's not only games that I see this being a problem. Just shopping around Amazon.com, I notice products lose detail on this screen when you have two like colors next to each other. That black stitching on those black shoes that is usually obvious? Where the black leather and black breathable mesh meet? Gotta zoom right in on it to see it is even there, otherwise it's just detail-less single black space. The best way I've found to fix this is to turn off the Dynamic Contrast feature, but this leaves more vibrant scenes looking more bland. So depending on the media you're consuming, you're going to have to change the settings. Which brings us to my next complaint. The responsiveness from the TV's menu navigation and remote commands. I can press the buttons for the volume or navigation quickly, but the TV just doesn't respond to the commands quickly. You need the volume down fast, but not muted? Too bad. Holding down the button doesn't help either, it doesn't accelerate after a second or two, same snail pace all the way. You know where everything is in the menu and want to adjust something quickly? Slowdown, Cowboy, you'll press the buttons faster than the TV will respond. So even if you did want to mess with settings between games for the best picture for a given event, it's going to take patience. I can't judge how a PS3 or Xbox will play on this TV, I don't own them. But from my experience, if you're a gamer with sharp eyes, don't grab this TV and expect to be competitive with ultra-fast response times and clear color contrast. I can only assume when you see that black chopper descending from the sky with that bright lens flare, you're going to see the same ghosting you would see from the PC version of the same game. Also, on bright scenes you will notice the backlighting isn't quite even, with some slight darkness on the left and right edges. I feel like a whiner for saying it, that hardly bugs me like any of the other mentioned problems, but I feel I should say it for completeness sake. See? Doesn't that all seem circumstantial and nit-picky? Think that'll apply to a lot of people? Most casual gamers, children, soccer moms or dads that just want to have a beer and watch the big game won't care about any of the issues I have. I doubt they'll even notice it. Most shows and cartoons have enough difference in color that the lack of contrast won't make you miss any important detail. I'm still trying to convince myself to keep the TV, this is the 2nd one I've had delivered to me. First one had a red stuck pixel, and none of the silly color changing backgrounds I threw at it fixed it. This one has some specks from foreign material getting trapped inside of it during manufacturing and single stuck grey pixel off in the lower left corner of the screen. Please not that these things happen with ALL TVs regardless of the manufacturer or cost and DOES NOT EFFECT THE RATING OF THIS PRODUCT. All judgements of ghosting and contrast issues were made viewing this TV in both a lighted room and with the lights off. If anyone has any questions or criticisms, free to comment. I am open to answering questions and accept constructive complaints or comments. -EDIT- 12-7-13 Another odd flaw has come to my attention. When viewing two different webpages side by side I noticed part of one of the page's design was replicated across the entire screen. To anyone with this TV and a computer, you can replicate this by going to TomsHardware.com and place the browser on the left or right side of the screen. The dotted lines between articles are spread across the entire screen and move as you scroll up and down the page. Once again, if you plan to use this TV as a monitor for a PC, I do not recommend it. I have made this a 2-star review now, the quality of the display is worse than I originally thought. I'm pretty sure I'll find more webpages or scenarios that will expose more flaws in this TV as time passes.