Budget TV. Review on Philips 29PT3223

Branded televisions like Philips, LG etc., are always Hot cakes during Festive sale. Every january we have this festival of the farmers called Pongal in tamilnadu, during this period every shop owner promises huge discounts at his shop.

This January(2005) our family decided to buy a new 29'' color TV, so we hunted the famous shops in chennai like VASANTH & Co, JAINSONS, VIVEK'S etc., and we found number of models packed with excellent features.

One of Haer's 29'' model had this unique way of shutting down the TV by vertical curtains, we were impressed but the price of that TV made us move to the next stall, it was LG, LG also had excellent features both on sound and audio, but finally we decided to go for the lowest priced 29'' color TV, after all what most matters is the size right?. You guessed it right, it was PHILIPS 29 PT 3223 and it was the lowest priced TV at that time, the guys were ready to give us the TV for 17,700 rupees.

Let me tell you more about the TV,

Looks:

Its a Flat TV with a Light Silver coloured coating on the top, its got the usual buttons like channel and volume, and a microphone jack at the front. We found it very difficult to carry it to the top floor of our house as it was very heavy.

Picture:

The picture clarity is normal, not exciting. It has default picture modes like Rich, Natural, Soft, Personal. The soft mode is the best mode when you are watching via cable. There is also features like contrast plus which can be accessed via the remote. One Added feature is 4:3 expand option, by pressing the up arrow key in the remote the picture on the screen is expanded to 4:3 which is amazing. The signal strength indicator (must be selected via remote) lets you know the cable strength for the particular channel. All together a decent picture performance.

Sound:

This is the worst part of this TV. Im still terribly shocked at the quality of audio I hear from this TV. I have a 25'' Philips(200 watt) non flat model still now, which can give 10 times better clarity sound. As I got used to hearing good quality audio via the 25'' phiips model, listening to video songs on this model was not so good experience. The manual says 200 watts??....Whatt??It also has Bass and treble boost controls, which again does little to the quality. FYI it also has AVL.

Menu and Remote:

Menu contains options for Picture, Sound, Channels editing. Sharpness, contrast can be accessed in the menu. The remote looks oK with big buttons, using the remote you can use the Teletext feature, which im afraid is of no use in india. Using the remote you can store your favorite channels on the top four color buttons. Each color button can store 8-10 channels. Ex. you can store all english channels in one color button.

Connectors:

Rear - 2 Audio/Video inputs

1 Audio/Video out

Component Video Input

S-Video input

Other features:

Sleep timer upto 240 minutes, Multi language OSD, 100 channels, Now the price of this TV is below 17k.

On the whole if youre looking out for a budget TV with normal features this one is for you.

Guys don't forget to rate this review and share your comments, which would help me