Hitachi UT32-MH700A

A quick visit to the Hitachi India website’s LCD TV section and you will be rewarded by perky little ‘new’ logos, trying to grab your attention to the latest by the esteemed Japanese manufacturers. But what good is a new product if it does not have something special? Hitachi knows this question and has answered with a ultra thin LCD TV, called the UT series (get it?). We have a nice little 32 incher from their new series, called the UT32-MH700A, for review today.

Design
The LCD TV is actually quite thin and very light. That explains the PC monitor like stand, which is a flat oval with a central column that jolts upward at the back panel, joining up with it. The stand is a light silver color, while the bezel for the TV is black. This contrast is actually a dampener for me, I would have preferred the whole color scheme to be black. The bezel on its own is a work of art, its actually very slick, with the front panel comprising a thick, dark, translucent rectangular frame made of plastic, that marries the back panel in smooth design harmony. This surface is not flat, rather slightly curved, tapering out at the outer edges uniformly. The bottom edge has a single thin metallic strip that looks very nice, the center of which glows blue when the unit is on. I must say that the TV really looks lovely aesthetic wise.

The buttons are actually on the bottom of the bezel, facing downwards. This I did not like, though it's not too much of an issue. Flush mounted, touch sensitive buttons would have been so much better. Hitachi has worked hard on the PCB layout to make it so thin, thus a few important adjustments will have to be made by us consumers too. The TV tuner and multimedia inputs are actually on a separate unit, covered in a black chassis looking like an external hard disk (vaguely). But not to worry, there still is one HDMI, one component video and a D-sub input on the TV itself. Of course the locations are all at the bottom of the bezel, facing downwards.