Evesham Alqemi 32 SX review

Features
This television isn't the most feature-rich we've ever seen. It does, however, have built-in Freeview, so you will have access to a range of digital channels not long after getting it out of the box, assuming you live in a Freeview area.

The Evesham's remote isn't particularly user-friendly and is quite ugly

The television supports a PC input of up to 1,366x768 pixels, which is good news for fans of the media centre PC and people who want to use this screen as a multi-purpose device. The reasonable response time of 8ms is certainly good enough for playing most games and while we wouldn't recommend using it as your main PC monitor, you could certainly browse the Web from your armchair if you so desired.

Performance
The Freeview picture quality was passable, although a little soft -- even with the sharpness turned up to the maximum setting. While watching Freeview we noticed there were some problems with solarisation in areas of solid colour, although it won't bother you too much if you're viewing from a distance. There was a fair amount of picture judder at times, too, which we found to be quite annoying.

The black levels achieved by this set are also a little disappointing. In areas that should be black, the backlight was quite visible, giving areas that should have been black a blue glow. Reducing the brightness helps to improve this situation, but that will only be a reasonable option to you if you watch TV in a darker room.

One irritation is that to reach the TV's configuration mode while you are watching TV means going through two sets of menus that look completely different (although you don't need to do this when using the HDMI input). Having a menu system that changes depending on what you are doing is confusing, and is bound to cause some people to scratch their heads in bewilderment.

There isn't much bass from the relatively weak speakers, although speech is reasonably easy to understand and, to be fair, we tend not to expect a huge amount from the speakers built into smaller LCD panels.

High-definition performance was better, although there was some blurring evident and the black levels were a little disappointing. Despite this, the television did a reasonable job of displaying high-definition video from our Blu-ray player. Talladega Nights looked especially good.

Conclusion
This is the sort of set that would be best bought as a second television for the bedroom or study, especially if you have access to a high-definition video source.

There are many things that aren't perfect about the set -- it won't be featuring in any glossy lifestyle magazines anytime soon and it's not the greatest in terms of inputs -- but for the money you can't complain too much.

Edited by Jason Jenkins
Additional editing by Kate Macefield