VU 24K16 LED TV - Below Par VU-ing

LED-backlit TVs are in and they’re getting cheaper as months go by. However, the larger screen TVs are expensive and many turn to smaller sized LED TVs that fit their budget and needs. VU has launched their new 24K16 LED-backlit TV to cater to this audience.

Design and Build Quality
The 24K16 has a 24-inch screen and looks more like a monitor with speakers than a regular LED TV, primarily because of the size. However, the TV is designed to look good. The glossy bezel at the sides are slim, giving it a sleek look. The bezel at the base is thicker to accommodate the in-built speakers located there. In terms of thickness as well, the TV is pretty slim like most other LED-backlight TVs.

The build quality isn’t upto the mark, though. We notice areas of the bezel to be a little loose, especially at the right bottom end of the TV, the power port felt a bit shaky, too. However, the ports are built and placed well. Although the TV stand looks good, it does not give the TV a firm base, making it wobble at  times. If you intend to plonk your TV in one place and not bother about moving it often, then this shouldn’t be a big concern for you. 

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Buttons at the back for various controls

The remote bundled with it, in one word is unconventional. Not only the layout of the buttons, but also the basic look of it.  While the build quality of the remote isn’t bad, the layout of the buttons is different. Apart from the ten digits, there is an extra column of the usual four-coloured buttons placed along the numbers. On most remotes, the number keys are placed by themselves without any other buttons next to them. Also, the mute and power buttons are a tad smaller in comparison, and the four-way direction pad buttons are a lot chunkier. Not a major deal breaker, and you will get used to the remote quickly enough.

Features
The TV as you might already know by now, has an LED-backlit screen. It’s also HD capable and has a resolution of 1920  x 1080 pixels. The TV is well equipped and has the standard component ports, an HDMI port, a SCART port and a VGA port, as well. If you plan on connecting your PC to the TV, you’ll have to buy a DVI-to-HDMI converter. Also, there’s a USB port to read JPG files or play MP3 files from a flash drive.

Good number of connectors

The interface of the TV is a combination of blue and white, though, it’s not the best seen. There’s not a lot of customisation available for the 24K16, apart from the regular brightness, contrast and colour saturation settings. You can also change the colour temperature and play around with the DNR, CTI, Flesh Tone and ALC, which are all present to enhance image quality. There are no RGB adjustment controls, so you can’t calibrate the display either.

The sound on the TV can be tweaked a little bit. There’s an equalizer and a few virtual surround sound settings to play with. You can also switch between the TV and external speakers. In addition, there’s AVC which normalises the audio and the Lip Sync which is supposed to keep sound and image in synchronization.
Performance
The TV is quite disappointing when it comes to pure display performance. The picture and video quality is pretty bad in most of the areas. Starting from the backlighting of the TV, the issues are quite visible as the blacks are not really up to the mark. While you can try to tweak the brightness and contrast, it will adversely affect the way the picture and video looks. The colours also appear to be washed out and are not natural. There was noise visible in darker scenes and pixelation could be seen, as well. While there wasn’t any jitter or stutter , we could sense a minor mouse lag when we connected the TV to a computer. Colour banding was visible, too as the display couldn’t render gradients of colours accurately.

Unconventionally designed remote

Contrast level tests in DisplayMate performed poorly and in the test with grey blocks lined in increasing order of saturation, only the first four blocks were visible. Almost all monitors and TVs we’ve reviewed display most of these shades. The same issue could be noticed across all other colours, except for blue.

We also noticed that the screen doesn’t turn off the image sharpening features fully, so all the text on screen has a fine edge which makes reading text off it quite annoying. The same problem could be seen with brighter colours such as yellow and green, where the test patterns had a clear white edge running along these colours. Gradients are poorly rendered and we noticed very visible noise where a shade of colour turns into black. 

The audio performance of the TV is pretty average. The speakers face downwards, and although that gives the TV a cleaner look up-front, making them face the user would’ve definitely improved audio quality. The speakers are clear only on low volumes and not so much when turned up.

Not a good option for a 24-inch LED-Backlit TV

Verdict
VU has been known for pricing their products for the budget segment and the same goes with the 24K16 LED TV. The model has been priced at Rs. 14,500 and while it definitely looks nice, its performance paints a completely different picture. Bad in most aspects of  video playback, we think that the display is just average for watching movies and very bad for use as a PC monitor due to the poor colour rendition and font rendering. For around the same price, you can buy a 23-inch Samsung P2370MS, or even the LG M237WAP monitors. Another good option for a small TV can be Sony’s KLV-22CX320 which is priced at Rs. 15,900, but do note that the Sony model has only 720p HD support.