Acer AT4220 review

There is also component in, which will be handy for gamers with either the Nintendo Wii or Microsoft Xbox 360. Further connectivity is provided in the form of two RGB Scart sockets, composite video in and VGA in for connection to a PC.

You can access the ports easily, even if you hang the TV on a wall

The menu system for controlling picture, sound and TV tuning is simple to use. There are some preset options for sound and video control including modes for movies, sport, concerts and games.

One thing it's hard to forgive is the lack of Freeview. It may be a cheap TV, but that's a huge oversight.

Performance
One slight disappointment with the AT4220 we reviewed was that there were three dead pixels on the panel. It's hard to judge the TV based on this -- it could simply have been a problem with our review sample. In practice, a dead pixel probably won't annoy you much in normal use, but it's worth noting that most manufacturers won't replace screens unless quite a few pixels are dead.

The picture quality of this television was excellent with high definition. HD DVD looks stunning with plenty of detail -- so much so that on the pop-video-style Bourne Supremacy, the original graininess of the film was visible. We didn't have any major problems with how blacks were reproduced, although we've seen better. Reducing the brightness helped to improve the intensity of blacks slightly.

When we connected a separate Freeview receiver, we saw quite a few problems with the picture. The AT4220 has a sharpness adjustment that can help hide some of the compression problems, but all this really achieves is to blur the image.

Upscaled DVD was far better quality. We popped The Big Lebowski into our Denon DVD-1930 and we were very pleased to see the quality was perfectly reasonable and much better than when watching Freeview.

The sound quality, however, wasn't quite as good as it could have been. We found that the audio lacked bass and that speech was a little unclear. You'd be better off investing in a set of home cinema speakers if you go for this set.

Plugging a computer into the screen gave us a pleasant and unexpected surprise. The output was clear and crisp, far more so than we have seen on televisions costing a great deal more. This is excellent news if you are planning on plugging a PC into you television, either to make use of Windows Media Center or even to play games.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Kate Macefield