Evesham Technology Alqemi 32VX review

Evesham's Alqemi 32VX has a stylish air to it.

It has a glossy black surround around a screen that is raised slightly from the matte black frame. The Alqemi certainly doesn't look like a budget model, but at only £450 including VAT, it's the cheapest 32in TV we've seen.

Tuning takes place automatically as soon as the TV is switched on for both analogue and digital channels. The picture quality the 32VX produced from our aerial was reasonable. On the analogue channels it managed to display a passable Channel Five, something that other sets we have tested found difficult. It also turned in an average performance when it came to handling interlaced material.

Colours are rich and vibrant, but looked quite realistic in our HD movie clips and progressive scan DVD. This set does suffer a lot from noise, however, producing a considerable amount of speckling in solid areas of colour such as sky.

Connecting the TV to a PC isn't as straightforward as using one of the two HDMI inputs. If you keep HD material on your media centre PC, you'll probably want to use a digital connection. Using the HDMI input, we were only able to get a resolution of 1,280x720. This is sufficient for watching HD movies, but for still images you'll want to switch to the D-sub input, over which it will display at the TV's native resolution of 1,366x768.

The speakers are placed down the sides of the screen. At 8W each, these are more than powerful enough to fill a large room. There's also a virtual surround option that proved surprisingly effective, giving the impression that sounds were coming from behind us.

There's an excellent range of inputs. There are two HDMI sockets, and both the SCART connections are RGB. An RGB SCART connection will give a better-quality picture than composite video, which can also be carried by SCART. Set-top boxes such as Sky+ or Virgin Media can benefit from this, as can DVD players, although component is a better connection for players that can output a progressive scan picture.

The Alqemi 32VX also has component, composite and S-video inputs. To change between inputs you have to keep pressing the Source button, but to make life easier you can disable any interfaces you're not using.

We were a little frustrated by the electronic programme guide (EPG). This doesn't have our preferred timeline layout, instead showing the information from one channel at a time. Accessing the EPG also cuts off the currently playing channel, which is a touch annoying.

Home users will be reassured by the one-year onsite swap-out warranty. This means that if any defects become apparent during that time, Evesham will bring a replacement and take the faulty set away, so you're never without a TV.

The Alqemi 32VX is a reasonably priced TV, with good picture quality. However, it is outperformed by last month's Labs winner, Toshiba's 32C3030, which costs only £40 more.

Author: Lynley Oram