Kogan 42″ LED-LCD TV Review

• The sound is really poor, you will need/want some external speaker…. even listening to the news is not pleasant on the built in speakers
• Image quality suffers on large text, e.g. ads and credits at end of show, you can see some rendering problems/blur probably due to the sluggish 50Hz response screen.
• Its less noticeable during the actual shows, and sports seem to fair reasonably ok.
• I have yet to test it on a true HD source, so some of this image issues could be related to the digital TV reception, which does drop out from time to time.
• Not great codec support on the USB playback functionality. After a bit of digging it is supposed to support AVI, Dvix and Mpeg2. The avi’s I have tried have failed, and I can’t be bothered re-encoding everything in to one of these outdated codec’s. Mp4, H264 etc should be standard by todays iWorld standards.
• PVR recording quality exacerbates the problems of image quality with a lot more ghosting.
• Only one tuner card, limiting usefulness of PVR function. Must be watching show to record it.

Overall: 

If your budget is tight, and or your not too concerned with having the best of the best in image quality, then this is a solid and hard to beat option. I’m deducting 1/2 a star for the well below par sound… although from reports on other brand similar slim TVs this seems to be a common problem. Personally I am so far quite happy with my purchase, I couldn’t justify spending any more money, and I have a small apartment meaning that 42″ was about as big as I could go. All in all a solid hard to beat LED TV.