Teco TL3212RM review

Teco's TL3212RM is by far the cheapest 32in LCD TV that we've seen.

Not that you'd notice by looking at it, as the glossy, piano-black surround and silver strip, which hides the speakers, make it look as good as more expensive TVs. The range of inputs is impressive, too, with two HDMI, D-sub, composite, component and two Scart sockets providing enough connectors for all your home-cinema kit.

Sadly, not quite as much effort has been put into the TV's quality. For starters, there's no digital tuner, so you'll need to buy a separate set-top box if you want to watch Freeview channels. We'd really expect digital TV with a modern TV.

The analogue tuner is quite good, though, and it automatically tuned into the five terrestrial channels. Reception was good and we got a stable picture on all the channels. Sadly, picture quality isn't very good.

Colours looked washed out in our test images and the TV's picture adjustments only resulted in harsh and garish colours. Playing standard-definition interlaced video produced some horrible results. Fast-moving objects showed some ghosting and, despite setting noise reduction to its highest level, there was significant speckling in large areas of a single colour. This is distracting, particularly when watching sports.

High-definition movie clips fared no better. We used the TV's two preset modes, Standard and Cinema. In Standard mode colours were washed out; in Cinema mode they had a garish tone. High-contrast scenes were badly displayed, placing a halo around dark objects.

The TL3212RM managed to display a reasonably sharp Windows desktop at its native resolution of 1,366x768 when connected to a PC via VGA. However, when we connected it to a computer using a DVI-to-HDMI cable, something rather peculiar happened: the PC detected the native resolution on the display as an unusual 1,360x765. This resulted in the TV repeating the pixels in the 1,360th column six times to match the screen's native width. This strange effect occurred with a second PC we tried, too.

Overall, it didn't do well in any of our monitor tests. In particular, it had a great deal of difficulty in reproducing our greyscale gradient, showing lots of banding.

Prices are falling all the time, and in a few months you'll probably be able to pick up Toshiba's Regza 32C3030D for a similar price. If you're really restricted to a tight budget, we'd recommend waiting that little bit longer rather than buying this TV.