Great TV/Monitor at a reasonable price

Author's Rating:

Pros: Lot of inputs. Great picture.

Cons: YCbCr input useless

The Bottom Line: 
This is great buy. Wonderful picture. Excellent tech support.

Author's Review
Compusa was running a special on the Olevia Syntax LT 27 HV LCD TV/Monitor recently. The price was $1000 with a $200 rebate. Since I had bad experiences with other sets from Viewsonic, Sharp, Envision and Sony, I plunged in.

The idea was to connect a Scientific Atlanta 8300HD using a HDMI to DVI cable, and to connect a DVD player using component video. Well, everything worked fine. That is until I tried to watch HDTV on our really big screen using a Marantz video projector.

It seems that plugging in an HDMI cable into the DVR disabled its component video outputs. Bummer. So, I plugged in the DVD cable into the other set of component video inputs on the LT 27 HV. Bad choice. Syntax, and other manufacturers have two different kinds of component video inputs. One is YPbPr, the other is YCbCr.

The YCbCr is for 480i, while the YPbPr is true high definition supporting 1080i among others. The LT 27 HV has been out about a year now, but the Viewsonic I bought and returned is a new model, and has the same type of component video inputs.

So, I connected the DVD player into the S-Video input. While I had both sets, I ran a test using a pattern on the Sound&Vision Home Theater Tune-Up DVD. After adjusting the sharpness on the Syntax, both screens looked identical to me.

The fact that the user can have different settings for brightness, contrast and other video settings for each input is a very good thing. Undoubtedly the settings for a VCR will be different from a DVR.

Picture quality is outstanding. Vivid colors. Contrast, brightness and sharpness great. The remote is quite good, though takes a little work to master. It would be nice to have direct access to the various inputs, but that would mean more buttons.

As far as flexibility, there are numerous inputs for a computer, composite video, DVI, S-Video and component video.

Oh, yes, tech support is very good. By e-mail or phone, response is pretty quick.