Westinghouse Electric SK-32H590D 32" HDTV LCD TV/DVD Combo

It is somewhat solid in design. this LCD/TV combo has several video in puts and a wide range of features. I will discus every pro and con in detail as we explore "The True Value of What We Buy". First off this TV features The ATI Xilleon image processor for some awesome image quality. the unit also has excellent black levels and a 3d Comb filter for static reduction. The final rating for image quality is 8.0 out of 10. It could stand to do better on static reduction but performs better than other TVs at a comparable price. After 4 weeks Three major flaws were found. the first is the timer function that allows you to turn the TV on at a specific time every day does not work most of the time so it is useless as an alarm clock. Wen watching a 5.1 channel digital channel, the sound does not always output 5.1 to an external amplifier, it down mixes the sound to stereo.(the workaround is to go into the TV menu and change the sound output setting to PCM and then back to AC3, every time.....)
The third problem is the time on the TV is constantly loosing time or gaining time. I have reset it to the correct time several times and tried all the time settings to fix the problem but none work.I have to set the time zone and weather to turn auto update time on or off. Either way it still runs slow by about two to five minutes each day. only one other flaw was discovered during normal use. I was channel surfing and it froze on 9.2 and stopped working. I had to unplug it and plug it back in just to get it to work again. this is an isolated incident and only happened once so far. some things that are worse about new digital TVs are not just the fact that the signal is prone to more loss and complete signal cutouts than traditional analog TVs, and you cannot manually add channels to the channel list they must be scanned and acquired via an automated scanning procedure. It should also have a video out so you can record a digital channel with a DVR or VCR. so you need to buy a stand alone ATSC tuner box to record these channels. The menus on this TV are well designed and easy to use and visually pleasing. the remote has a button to scroll through screen size settings which is good but they could have added a quick select setting to stretch the picture to fill the screen without having to go into the main menu to change this setting.other than that the Tv is pretty good, has great contrast and decent noise filters. Now on to the integrated DVD player. It plays DVD-video, DVD-audio, DVD+R/RW, DVD-R/RW, CD-DA, VCD, SVCD, mp3/wma and jpeg, Mini DVD, .VOB and some .H263 Mpeg4 files with either a .mpeg4 or .divx extension. Thats quite a lot of formats to support! however it is not as good as my Lite-on ("clone") DVD recorder with built in Hard Disc Drive. It has far better picture and sound quality and excellent de-blocking. The westing house DVD player says it up converts DVDs to near HD quality yet my stand alone performs better! and it is only 480i/480p capable! not to mention it is region free! The westing house DVD player cannot even decode DTS sound and is locked to playing only region 1 encoded discs. That means It will not play foreign movies from other countries. DTS sound is way better than regular Dolby Digital 5.1 because it has less compression and therefore better quality. I am a movie enthusiast and have discovered that I prefer sound quality to picture and even if I preferred picture quality to sound a good stand alone DVD player will beat the Westinghouse's integrated dvd player.It also has limited navigation and no zoom functions. The DVD players final rating is 6.0 out of 10 and the TVs final rating is 8.0 out of 10. I would say it is worth $450 but certainly not $800 So far there are no firmware updates to correct the timer or time settings. also on a side note when I looked in my universal remotes manual for the TV code I tried the ones listed under white westing house and none worked, but the remote code under SONY did! I certainly hope this does not mean that it is a sony clone or is in any way manufactured by sony! Almost all of there TVs Die within 1-3 years and cost a lot to fix and suffer from burn in or color blotches on the screen. so here's hoping It lasts longer than 3 years!