alex.moskalyuk

I was reading a review of Vizio P42 HDTV linked from the product page on Yahoo! Tech, and couldn’t help but agree with the reviewer on pluses and minuses, being an owner of Vizio GV42L 42 inch LCD HDTV for roughly a month now.

The pluses include a bright picture, a nice viewing angle, and a great price to boot combined with Costco’s exchange policy. There was a week when you could purchase the item at Costco for $1,399, using Costco’s own coupon, which they usually give away in front of the store. The TV was extremely easy to set up, and the process of taking it out of the box and setting it up took about 10 minutes.

The minuses mentioned in PC World review are relevant for GV42L and probably are applicable to an entire Vizio brand of HDTVs. The remote needs to be pointed directly at the television set, even slight angle gets ignored. The speed of the remote is also something that leaves much to be desired, as sometimes in an effort to bring up the volume, or, vice versa, turn it down, you’d be hitting the volume key quite frequently, only to see the bar increase or decrease slowly, so there’s obviously a speed or data loss issue between the TV set and the remote.

The location of inputs (on the back of TV facing down, so requires much crawling) is hardly relevant, as most of the cables get set up initially and then rarely touched. The number of inputs offered by this specific TV set is also quite impressive:

1x Co-axial RF (ATSC/QAM/NTSC), 2x HDMI with HDCP (1 with StereoAudio RCA), 2x Component YPbPr plus Stereo Audio, 1x RGB PC plus Stereo Audio,1x S-Video plus Stereo Audio (shared in AV2), 2x Composite Video plus StereoAudio (AV1 & AV2)

The quality of the image is comparable with other LCD HDTVs, and I haven’t had or heard any complaints about it. Overall, GV42L is a great LCD HDTV, and my next project is to try it out with HDMI cable.