One of the most famous brand names when it comes to LCD TVs and computer monitors is Samsung. A lot of people are familiar with the sleek and stylish glossy black designs. And of course, we wanted to have one at home so we purchased the Samsung Series 3 32-inch LA32B350F1 LCD TV.
The LA32B350F1 has a measurement of 32 inches diagonally along the viewable area and weights just around 13.8 kilograms. It’s not that heavy and the appliance store assistant at SM City North Edsa Appliance Center hand-carried it for us until we reached our car. The package contains the TV, the manual, set of screws, the Antenna to Cable converter, cleaning cloth (which we didn’t get) and the remote control. The bundle included a free DVD player which is practically useless for us since we already have 4 DVD players which include 2 computers. It has a remote controller but not a lot of features.
There are several types of input/output connections at the back of the TV. There are 2 HDMI ports, a D-Sub port which is the analog connection to the PC, and ports for Composite and Component cables. And of course, there’s an antenna port for TV antennas and cable TV. It’s not that many but those would suffice. You can connect your DVD players, game consoles, your laptop computer, HDMI media players, and stereo components and so on. Sorry though, you can’t connect a USB device to the TV.
Since it uses HDMI, the picture quality is very nice. You won’t get much out of analog connections. You’ll most likely see blocky images. But when used with HDMI devices and videos, it looks fantastic. The same rules apply. If you have a low quality video do not expect it to match the quality of a much higher quality video.
It has great features such as the ability to play those high quality 1080p videos. It does deliver. We connected my sister’s laptop to it and I played a full 1080p Girls Generation music video and it was a charm. There are preset settings for color and picture set up so you won’t have to guess which combinations of contrast, brightness and color you have to get in order to get good picture quality. There’s also a game mode wherein it enhances your video games a bit especially on old consoles such as the Sony Playstation 2. We also have the PIP or Picture-in-Picture feature where you can video 2 videos at the same time. You can set up how they are displayed easily.
When it comes to its functionality, we were quite disappointed with its channel set up. It looks for the channels manually. It took a while for the TV to complete the search through our cable channels and to our dismay, the channel numbers were rearranged. It’s either that, or you manually search the signals of each channel. It is so frustrating. The menus are easy to navigate and set up. You can adjust the picture, color, audio, connectivity/source as well as the more advanced features such as the Game mode, PIP, enhanced edges, and so on.
As for audio, the speakers aren’t that powerful and you really won’t feel the surround sound feature that much. If you have money to spare, I suggest you purchase a home theater system along with the unit or just a good set of speakers.
But when it comes to availability, we were informed by most of the appliance centers we went to, the production of the Series 3 line of LCD TVs seems to slow down to promote the newer LCD TV models because of new technologies and better features. This resulted in a much lower price. We got the TV for 25,000 Pesos which is around $545. Not bad at all although when you consider some other brand names, the LA32B350 is quite expensive.
So far, we’re really enjoying the LCD TV and we’re satisfied. We came from an old 26-inch Sony Trinitron which lasted for almost 20 years. That CRT TV was already damaged and the picture was unclear. We are starting to love our Samsung LA32B350F1 more and more and hopefully, it would last for a very long time. I have no regrets in shelling out that much and I gave it as a gift to my mom, for me and my sister as well. It’s really a good buy.
Source:
Samsung Series 3 350 – LA32B350F1 – LCD – TV
http://www.samsung.com/ph/consumer/tv-audio-video/tv/lcd-tv/LA32B350F1XXP/index.idx?pagetype=prd_detail&returnurl=
