RCA L26HD31 26" HDTV LCD TV

My mother let me choose the TV that she was going to buy for my sister for Christmas. We decided on a price cap and this TV fit within that. When I first looked at it in the store, I cringed at the RCA name and the horrible picture on it. Then I tried to think beyond the brand name. Of course it's going to look horrible in a store. They have the same TV signal split between 20 different TVs and it's not even calibrated. I decided to buy the RCA L26HD31 26 inch and test it out at home under real life conditions.

The first thing I noticed about this TV was that the...chassis I guess you call it looked great for an RCA. I really liked the way it looked. It was also really light - I was able to carry the box using one hand. Assembly was quick but I had one hiccup. I unscrewed the stand cap on the TV which was easy but then the cap itself would not come out. I had to use a small knife to pry it out. The manual stated it should just pop out by itself.

The first test I performed was to hook up a DVD player to it with a HDMI cable. I used the Oppo DV-980H (the specs are here http://www.oppodigital.com/dv980h/default.asp) and a Phillips HDMI cable. Since the TV does not support 1080p I set it to the next best thing which was 720p. I tried out the best transfer I had on DVD - the Terminator 2 eXtreme DVD which looks absolutely stunning on my JVC 32" iArt tube TV. I was saddened to find that it looked very washed out, grainy, and there was some noticeable artifacting. Then I thought, "hey, I haven't calibrated it yet". So I popped in my Avia Home Theatre DVD and proceeded to calibrate the TV.

While calibrating, I noticed that the picture controls (color, brightness, tint, contrast, etc) weren't very fine. Each setting had a slider bar and it while you could press that button maybe 30 times to get it sliding, it didn't seem like it was doing much. It only seemed like there were about 5 points where it changed. Then again, it could be that my eyes aren't trained enough to notice that small of a difference. Something else about the picture setup annoyed me. There was an option for noise reduction which I wanted to turn off but I was only given the options of low, normal or high. One good thing about the menu was that there was an option called "Film Mode" which actually turns on and off 3:2 Pulldown. I thought this was pretty handy.

So after an hour of calibrating I put back in my Terminator 2 DVD and went back to the same 3 scenes. They hadn't changed a bit. Blacks were ridiculously light, everything still seemed washed out and you could still see artifacting. I hooked up my DVD player back to my JVC just to make sure this wasn't in my head and it looked perfect. Then I decided to try my Akira DVD to see how animation looked the TV. It still looked bad. I was sad. I really tried to give this TV a chance but it failed every expectation.