 "Onida Svelte 24-inch LED TV - Neighbour's Envy, Owner's Pride?")
Onida was one of the big players back in the 90s. I was always fascinated with their advertisements as a kid, but then they kind of disappeared for a while. However, they’ve been diligently pushing their products for a couple of years now, and although I’ve never owned an Onida product before, I was quite happy to see that they’ve introduced a small, entry-level LED lit TV. Keep reading to find out if you’d really be proud to own one of these.
A pretty nice looking TV
Design and features
This TV is really slim, and looks quite nice. It has a thin pane of glass surrounding the bezel, which gives it a pretty sophisticated look. Of course, you have the name Onida written in big block letters at the bottom center of the border. However, they’ve added some squiggly designs on the glass, that sort of ruin the effect. Another problem I noticed was that there were particles of dirt that seemed stuck between the TV screen and the glass panel. At first I thought it was a pixel-burn and was horrified, but it turned out to be just a particle of some sort.
Squiggly designs maketh an ugly TV
Onida claims that this TV is 10 times tougher than your average LCD, but I beg to differ. The stand for this TV is quite solid, but getting it fixed to the screen is a bit of a pain. And once the stand was eventually fixed, I noticed that the TV wobbled a bit, which is definitely not a good thing. Even the TV itself seems to have been made from materials that are just about average.
As far as input options go, there a quite a few, but like every other annoying TV, they’ve put them facing downwards, which can be quite annoying if you don’t know your way around the back of a TV. Another problem is that Onida has failed to provide cables of any sort. Forget HDMI; they haven’t even given component cables that cost virtually nothing.
Here’s a list of the connectors at the back:
Plenty of input options, but no cables to match them
HDMI x 2
USB x 2
VGA x 1
PC Audio Input
Composite/Component
A/V Out
Antenna Input
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Performance
Using the TV is quite easy, apart from a few kinks that Onida definitely needs to work in. For instance, the USB slot accepted my flash drive, and it even played back an AVI file, but the controls are a little weird. You have a separate control section on the remote for navigation and to preview video files, but to actually play the file, you have to press a button that’s at the bottom of the remote. Playing MP3s was even more frustrating, as it seemed impossible to move from one track to another.
The view from above - not bad
When I put in our test disc, I was greeted with some really beautiful looking colours. Everything looked really rich, vibrant and real. The black levels were also good. However, when I turned to an action sequence, I noticed a lot of lag in the images, which meant plenty of ghosting and streaking. Not a good sign at all. I even checked out some normal sequences, and they all showed signs of lag in the picture. Just when I thought that this TV was really good, it started showing signs of weakness. I even played the disc through the PS3, and it had the same problem. Next, I plodded on, testing it with a game. For some strange reason, the game seemed to be pretty OK. It wasn’t great, but the lag seemed a little less apparent to me. One other big issue I faced was with the viewing angle. Unless you are sitting at just about the right angle, you will not get a very good, clear picture.
The flimsy stand
Last, but not least, I tested the TV with DisplayMate, and the results showed that this was an average TV. The Svelte scored 38 out of 60 points, which is actually not too bad. It scored less in tests like screen uniformity, fine line moiré pattern, streaking and ghosting. It didn’t do exceptionally well any fields apart from colour scales, where all the colours seemed to be OK except for blue. The rest of the tests were all average.
The sound levels for the Svelte are pretty loud, but very tinny. Onida hasn’t bothered too much with the sound, as it’s mostly treble and higher mid frequencies. There’s very little bass and not enough lower mid frequencies in the output of sound. But then again, this is a budget LED screen, so I guess you can’t have everything. My advice would be to buy a set of decent speakers if you want better sound.
Nice and slim
Verdict
This TV is strictly OK, but it is quite affordable at Rs. 22,990. Obviously, it is an entry level LED TV, so you can’t really expect world-class quality, so I give it 3 stars. I’ve cut a star for the terrible ghosting and streaking issues, as well as the poor viewing angle and another star for the smaller things like the USB playback issues and substandard sound.