Auria 26" LCD TV installed - review

Next day delivery of the TV/monitor was a pleasant surprise, though it left me a bit unprepared. It worked flawlessly out of the box. The HD picture quality is fantastic. I borrowed my brother's OTA antenna for a bit, then switched to a pair of regular rabbit ears. Without spending any time looking for the best reception alignment I got several channels right away, including the World Cup on CBC-HD. Gorgeous.

It functions well as a monitor as well. I tried the VGA input and the DVI-HDMI inputs and both work resonably well. The image is a bit fuzzy but for watching AVI/YouTube its fantastic. I got a bit nervous swapping cables around on my aging desktop XP machine -- at one point It would not boot at all -- so I haven't played with all the possible configurations. It may be my imagination but I thought the VGA input quality was significantly better than the HDMI connection.

My biggest complaint is that the user-interface is very slow: whether you are changing channels, input modes, or fiddling with any of the TV options, the interface is very slow to respond. This is a disappointment as I wanted to be able to quickly switch between TV and monitor modes (so I can write these blog posts during commercial breaks). As it is I'm getting used to not having CNN or CBC Newsworld buzzing in the background while I'm working on the computer.

The audio quality, as I was led to believe, leaves a bit to be desired, but that can be solved quite easily by plugging TV audio out to a decent speaker setup.

Overall, for the price ($199 + $20 shipping), this is a great bargain if you are looking for a primary-use TV and secondary-use monitor.