Medion MD20099 review

Medion's MD 20099 is the cheapest 32" LCD TV we've seen, although not by much; Hyundai's A321, reviewed in Labs, Shopper November 2006 costs just £20 more.

A low price usually indicates that some cutbacks have been made along the way, and the MD20099 is no exception. The 10W speakers, set either side of the screen, don't produce bad sound, but they lack bass. You can't turn them up too loud, either, as they start to distort at high volumes and are painful to listen to.

The MD20099 has a high native resolution of 1,366x768, which is fine for PC use. Its contrast ratio of 1,000:1 is about average, as is the 8ms response time. Unfortunately, it has no Freeview tuner, so you can't watch digital television unless you buy a set-top box. Instead, the TV has a standard analogue tuner. Once you've turned the TV on and selected your country, it automatically tunes to the TV stations. You can reorganise the channels in the order you prefer, but this took some guesswork as the manual's instructions were incorrect.

Sadly, the MD20099 didn't produce a very good picture. Its analogue reception was worse than all the 32" models in last month's Labs. This is a shame, as the MD20099 has two analogue tuners, so you can watch two channels at once using the TV's picture-in-picture function. Things got much better when we ran our interlaced video tests; Medion's TV came second only to LG's award-winning 32LC2D (opposite). It provides a good range of inputs: two SCART, S-video, component and HDMI. We also tried our test HD movies. The MD20099 displays 720p movies natively and downscales 1,080i movies to fit the screen's native resolution. Unfortunately, the quality here wasn't so good. Colours were muted and finer details were difficult to see in darker scenes.

The problem with dark colours was highlighted when we ran our standard monitor tests using a PC. The MD20099 has a VGA input for PC use, although you can use the HDMI input with a converter. Even with adjustments to the brightness and contrast, the MD20099 produced the worst greyscale we've seen on an LCD TV. Most darker transitions were poor and banded, as were those at the lighter end of the spectrum. In our still photos, details were missing from darker areas of the pictures. Games look great for the most part and the TV did a good job of displaying the high-quality graphics. However, there was some slight blurring when gameplay got very fast.

The MD 20099 is outperformed by Hyundai's A321, which is also better for watching HD movies. Neither can hold a candle to LG's 32LC2D, though, so if you want to watch HD movies, it's worth paying the £300 extra.

Author: Lynley Oram