Review: Envision L19W661 HDTV

Although my household keeps TV watching rooted in the family room, many families enjoy having a small television in the kitchen, bedroom or even a bathroom. Unless you’re a hardcore gearhead, you’re probably not looking for a big screen with surround sound in these smaller venues. For these areas, ease of use, a small footprint and an affordable price tag are likely to be the critical selling points.

The L19W661 is a 19-inch widescreen HDTV with an integrated high def tuner, stereo speakers and both HDMI and PC inputs. The latter means it can easily double as a computer monitor. The rear cover easily detaches to make the necessary connections, but the recess could use a little more room for fellow sufferers of “man hands.”

Setting up the display was a piece of cake and frankly, I was quite impressed by the on-screen wizards and setup menus. Envision has gone a long way to make setup and channel programming as simple (and color-coded) as possible. This is refreshing to see at this price point and I was continually reminded of the simplicity offered by a Microsoft software installation wizard (minus the system crashes).

The remote control is a classy-looking black and chrome number and makes good use of color-coded buttons during the aforementioned setup menus. My only serious gripe with the remote is its dual set of cursor/directional keys. The larger top set are actually channel and volume buttons, but every time I entered a system menu I was tempted to use them. Then I remembered I have to use the smaller, inferior set on the lower portion of the remote. This isn’t a huge deal, but it was enough of a pain that it warrants mention.

Like many small LCDs, the Envision has a noticeable bright bar across the top and bottom of the display when looking at a black screen. These areas aren’t noticeably brighter during regular program viewing, but if you plan to watch a lot of widescreen movies, your black bars may not look very black. Generally speaking, picture quality was very good and the integrated ATSC tuner did a fine job picking up more than a dozen local digital broadcasts. I find that most LCDs have a somewhat grainy image – sort of a constant low-level video noise – and the L19W661 was no exception. If you sit very close this might be a problem, but from two or three screen widths away, it was barely noticeable.