It has been 2 months since I brought home this beauty! And it has been such a wonderful experience with this product that I couldn’t stop recommending this to others buying TVs from LG or Samsung or Sony BLINDLY, or those blindly even going for LCD TVs.
For those who’re in a hurry, I’ll describe the TV first. It’s a real delight! It looks really very elegant. It is 40% slimmer than regular CRT TVs, has really good picture quality(for those who don’t know, Onida’s technical competence and excellence comes from Japanese Victor Company, better known as JVC, and this has high quality AV products in the market, though not very popular in India). It has 350 watts of sound(higher sound output options are also available, along with built-in woofer) and sound quality is quite good. As far as I can make out, the new Onida team has brought lots of Customer-centric innovations in their products and it seems to be their guiding pinciple now.
Some really unique and innovative features are:
(i) USB Input: it plays almost all common video types, JPEG and MP3 from USB. You can also browse the entire folder structure of your disk(only FAT file system is supported, and in USB Mass Storage Mode. Media Transfer Protocol is not supported) I’ve never seen USB input in a CRT in any other brand. And while playback from USB, all the functions usually available while playing from a usual VCD are available to the user. What’s more! I play movies not just from my USB Thumb drive, but from my 250 GB USB Hard-Drive by using an additional 5-Volt power supply to the disk
(ii) It has Digital eye, which adapts the picture settings according to the lighting conditions of the room, a real good feature in Onida TVs since more than 1.5 decades now. This drastically reduces undue strain in eyes, especially if you watch TV for long hours
(iii) It has a Music mode, in which you can switch the display off, and only the audio system works. This is really good when you’re just listening to music and the display bothers you unnecessarily. A good music system as well!
(iv) It has introduced half-muting: there are 2 levels of muting: half and full. I found this feature really very helpful. Imagine your family watching a favorite show when somebody rings up your phone. In such cases, a full-mute may kill the mood of other members watching and half-muting may be just enough for you to attend the call. You anyway have a choice of pressing the button twice for full-muting!
(v) It has a recording option too. though I’ve not yet explored this option
Other than that, it has in-built scene and sound modes, plus user customizable modes. It has in built FM Radio, and you can save channels also, I believe, with auto scan & all. It even has a basic brick-game. It also has a Component Video Input.
One limitation of this TV is that I found the remote control to be not very responsive. For an advanced user like me, it makes sense, but for an average user, so many buttons may be a little overwhelming. But then, the menu options are quite user-friendly. And a TV with so many features is likely to have such a kind of remote.
====22-26" LCDs Vs CRT and my purchase process====
I just needed a good TV giving me superior picture quality and sound quality. For me, I didn’t really require the TV to be hung on a wall or look just 1 inch slim. Price wasn’t a deterrent at all. I was ready to spend upto 28, 000/- on a 26 inch LCD. In fact until the purchase date, I had gone around most of large home appliance retail outlets in the city: Croma, E-Zone, TMC, etc, trying to judge the quality of LCDs in terms of my parameters, relative to LCDs.
I did a lot of independent assessment trying to compare the picture and sound quality of CRT & LCD in 21"/22-26" respectively. It is a popular belief that LCDs offer much better picture quality than CRTs. I didn’t take this word for granted and when I compared, I found that it depends on the video source, and the quality of LCD panel, plus viewing distance. Sound quality wise, in the 20-27, 000 price range, most LCDs don’t offer good sound quality and practically you’ll need a home-theatre system. For regular TV Viewing from a Set-top box like Tata Sky or Airtel Digital TV, I should say that I didn’t find CRT TV Picture quality any poorer than LCD TV, (except for flicker: it is almost non-existent in LCD) In fact, if you don’t maintain a good viewing distance, and if you compare with a cheaper LCD TV with low contrast ratio, and for TV viewing(non HD, non DVD quality), CRT might even give you the same or even better picture quality. And these days CRT TVs are 40% slimmer and come in really good looking forms, similar to LCDs from front. If you don’t use HDMI ports, or high-end video input sources, and are not concerned about looks and being slim so much, and want to buy a TV in 22-26" size, do think again. Is LCD the only good option? I wouldn’t say yes to this.