Teac T19LID638 review

Teac’s T19LID638 has a higher native resolution than the other 19in TVs here and also supports a 1080p input, although this has to be downscaled to match the TV’s 1,440×900 resolution. Interestingly, it will take a 24p signal from a Blu-ray player.

The T19LID638 uses a similar menu system to Logik’s L22LID648 but has more options for image tweaking and resizing, including colour temperature tuning and digital noise reduction. Colours in Casino Royale on Blu-ray appeared natural and required little tweaking. Contrast was good but dark areas looked grainy. This TV doesn’t have advanced motion processing, but there wasn’t any noticeable juddering in fast action scenes.

A panel at the side of the screen houses a slot-loading DVD player, a USB port and a memory card reader, which supports SD and MMC cards for displaying pictures directly. The USB port accepted only one of two flash drives we tried, however, and doesn’t support USB hard disks or mobile phones set to mass storage mode. Pictures from our flash drive and SD cards took a while to render, and image quality wasn’t great. There are no options to set the delay between pictures or repeat a directory, so the TV can’t be used as a digital photo frame.

Image quality from the DVD player was good, with very little ghosting and good anti-aliasing on sharp edges. The DVD player has an option to output at 720p, which means that it has to upscale DVD from its native 576p. Choosing this option produced a grainier, more jagged image.

Teac is best known for its audio products, so we weren’t surprised to find an optical S/PDIF sound output. This means you can hook this TV up to an external decoder to get surround sound from the built-in DVD player. You’ll certainly want to do this, as the sound quality of the internal speakers is poor and the volume is low.

We connected the TV to a PC via VGA and got a pixel-perfect 1,440×900 desktop. Perversely, the auto-adjust option made the image drop off the sides of the screen, and we had to perform a factory reset to revert to the perfectly good default setting. Text was clear and contrast was good, but colours in images and presentations were oversaturated. We tried connecting via HDMI, but once again we found the image didn’t fit and looked fuzzy.

Auto-tuning the TV channels took three minutes and 49 seconds. There’s an option to skip the analogue channels, which is handy if you only want to use Freeview. The digital noise reduction was useful in reducing the fuzziness of Freeview images, but colours were oversaturated. While sharing a menu system and EPG with Logik’s L22LID648, the T19LID638 has more options, including a filter for radio stations, a scheduler and a reminder function. However, the colour scheme means it’s not easily readable from more than around eight feet away.

The T19LID638 has some interesting features but is let down by its overblown colours and awful internal speakers. Matsui’s M19LID618 is a better all-round TV and much better value.