Syntax Olevia LT30HV 30

Reviewed by: ghali98

Duration of ownership:

Strengths: Price, price, price! Good quality picture, decent sound from on-board speakers

Weaknesses: Spotty reliability of component input. If you have lots of connections, gets pretty crowded in the back. Remote counter-intuitive.

Overall Evaluation: Bought this TV arond the holidays for under $1000 - was sold out within 2 or 3 days of the price drop and has since rebounded in price. I had read varied reviews but overall felt comfortable with purchase. I think some negative reviewers were unrealistic - you won't get a $5000 TV for $1000! Having said this, there are many pluses to the TV. It's pretty thin and light. I could lift myself, but better to have help because of the size. Looks beautiful coming out of a very well-packed box. Easy to set up, but I'd recommend reading the manual - especially as some of the inputs (such as RF input) are unusually located. The inputs will accept: RF (your cable), component (one prograssive, one not), super video, RCA, DVI/HDCP, VGA, subwoofer out. Practically this means that for most people you have enough inputs. However, it does get crowded in the bak, especially with a thicker component cable - I was able to get the back panel on again with some difficulty. For now, I left the attached speakers on and did not hook up to an external sound system. I have tried regular cable, DVD with component, and with S-Video. I also tried regular RCA and VGA. I have not used the DVI input yet. The picture is very good across the board. I had no burned out pixels. DVD quality is superb, but I had an unusual problem specifically with the Y/Pb/Pr input which is concerning. With certain DVDs, the screen would intermittently flicker to blue or get distorted in the upper area. I contacted Syntax with regard to this - so far they can't figure it out, but the problem has persisted even after I changed DVD players. There maybe a problem with the input itself - though most of the time seems to work just fine. The rest work perfectly. I used the VGA input for my laptop, and it was a piece of cake to do, and the quality was decent. I don't think that would be good enough for gaming, but as I don't use it for that, I haven't tried the DVI input. Regular cable is decent. Here, I have to say the picture is not great, but that's because the quality of the signal is not great - you have to get a high def signal to get a really good picture. For regular cable my CRT is better, but that's because the Olevia really brings out the defects in a low quality signal. Bottom line - you don't buy this if all you want to do is plug in your regular cable. As I said before, sound is actually pretty good from the supplied speakers. The remote is pretty dumb, but so far works reliably. I have the new remote (I think they changed remotes at some point). I read lots of reports about the remote being unreliable but hasn't happened to me. It just takes a lot of getting used to because there is no "select" button - a large "menu" button is in the middle. To select a choice you have to push on arrow right.... The tv has nice features like PIP, multipanel picture, split screen etc., but I've never really been interested in all that, so I don't use... Aesthetically, the TV is actually very nice. It's silver, and while plugged in and off there's a blue light surrounding the power button which actually looks good. Again, I didn't really care about that, but it's a bonus. It does get pretty warm after use. One other thing: you may be surprised when your wide-screen tv shows bars at the top and bottom with a wide-screen DVD. This is because these DVDs are too wide for regular "TV widescreen" specifications. More technically, if the aspect ratio on the DVD is> 1.8 approx, you still get bars - it's not the TV's fault. Bottom line: For the price this TV is hard to beat. It's versatile enough to be a monitor, 2nd TV set, home theater component, etc. It's not the best out there - but it's easily better than anything in the under $2000 category. 30 inches is a very nice size - and not too big for the bedroom. However, don't expect the world's greatest TV. It seems that some reliability issues may come up - in my case the component input problem, others had trouble with the remote. Despite this, their customer service seems to be pretty good - hopefully I can update when they solve my problem. Would I recommend it? Yes.