Akai LCT2701TD 27" LCD TV/DVD Combo

We purchased ours on ebay about a year ago for $750...I believe it's now available on ebay for around $400-500. Not bad at all.

It's important to remember that there are very few brands/models of LCD displays of this size that have a built in DVD player. There's Toshiba, Westinghouse...maybe one or two more. But they are typically more expensive than the Akai. The brightness (550 cd/m2) is higher than the others and it has a higher contrast ratio as well. These are small things, but if you have this in a room with ambient light it makes for a clearer/sharper picture (than the other brands with lower brightness/contrast specs). There are a few different picture set ups available: standard 4:3, "full" screen, panoramic, a couple of widescreen choices, and unscaled. We typically only used one or two different choices, depending on if we were watching standard TV (we'd use the 4:3), or using the DVD player (we'd use the full screen or one of the wide screen choices). It has plenty of video inputs: C-video, S-video, Component, VGA (15 pin). It also has a digital coax out if you want to take it to a separate surround system, as well as a 9 pin serial connection if you want to use 3rd party control (high end stuff like Crestron or AMX control systems). For our purposes, this was only for a simple, clean set up...no entertainment center with different components all over. So we only used the cable input. We did connect a laptop to the VGA input once and it was a nice picture, equal to that of the laptop.

The one thing that the other brands have over this one is the audio power of the built-in speakers. These are only 6 or 7 watts/channel which isn't bad, but it's not up to what I would consider standard these days. It has selections for different audio set ups (stereo, virtual surround) but it never sounded like anything more than stereo. There is also a noticeable audio hum which I did not care for. As I understand, this is typical of lower priced LCD TVs.

The set takes about 8 seconds to warm up...not a big deal but some might find that annoying. Menus are relatively simple to go through and straightforward. The DVD player can be a bit quirky. Sometimes we'd get subtitles turned on as the default which was annoying. Fortunately the remote has a button specifically for subtitles so you could turn them off quickly without having to go through the DVD menu. If you pause a DVD it will go into a screen saver after only a minute or so...the annoying part was that when you'd come back and press play, it wouldn't play...it would simply take it out of screen saver, so you'd have to press play again. And the last thing with the DVD player was that it didn't always respond really well. For example, I'd put a DVD in the player, but decide I won't want to watch it right away...I'm going to watch TV for a while. Then when I decide to watch the DVD, I'd switch to the DVD input and press play...nothing...just blue screen. I'd press every button I could think of and still nothing. So I'd have to get up and eject the DVD, then put it back in. Is this a major thing? No. It's just a little annoying.

The remote is pretty standard. One reviewer hated the remote...I'm not sure why because I found it quite simple to use. I don't like that the mute button is actually just an icon of a speaker with a slash button through it. I'd prefer than it actually say "Mute". And the remote doesn't like to be off axis from the TV too much. It seemed like anything more than about 20 degrees off axis didn't work, so you need to be close to being dead on in line with the TV.

This is a slightly older model so it doesn't have an HD tuner built in, nor does it have an HDMI input. Most sets have the HD tuner standard now and HDMI is becoming pretty typical as well. We also found that even for our smaller living room the 27" really isn't quite big enough. This would be better suited in a bedroom. Ours has unfortunately since been stolen so we are now in the market for a new one...and I'm now looking for something in the 37" range...odds are likely I'll stick with Akai.