Moser Baer's 24-inch ICE LCD - Feel that Chill?

Apparently, Moser Baer named its new range of TVs ICE, because they thought they were really cool. Well, the 24-inch full HD LCD we received certainly looked the part, but whether it’s cool, hot, or just plain luke warm remained to be seen. Yes, yes, I tested it alright, and if you want to know what the final outcome was, keep reading.

Design and Features
Straight out of the box, the ICE looks really nice and sleek, although the bottom part of the border is a tad wide. It doesn’t have a conventional design with a stand and screws to hook it up to. Instead, it has a foldout rear stand that you can prop it up against. But here’s where it starts going south. The stand feels tacky, and looks like it might break after a while. And to make matters worse, the geniuses at Moser Baer have actually put the controls and the inputs on that very stand. So if your stand breaks, you’re definitely in for a hard time.

The ICE has quite a lot of decent features including 1080p playback, a dynamic contrast ratio of 15,000:1 and an aspect ratio of 16:10. It also has quite a few input/output options right from HDMI, composite and component video to S-Video, PC VGA (with audio input) and an earphone out. But there’s no USB, and that saddens me greatly, as I am sure it does you as well. Why, Moser Baer, why?

The remote is pretty standard and easy to use, so you will not have to bend over and fiddle with the rear of the TV, where the controls are situated. This can be quite a pain, especially when you know they could’ve just as easily placed the controls at the front (what with the bottom panel being so wide).

Performance
My first impression of the ICE wasn’t very good, but I obviously wanted to give it a fair shot. So I was hoping that it would perform well and win me over. Well, it didn’t do too badly, but let’s just say that the ICE wasn’t all that hot either.

I connected the TV to a Blu-ray player via HDMI, popped the test disc in and ran through a few scenes. Everything seemed alright, but after a couple of minutes, I noticed that the edges seemed a little dull, and the overall picture was a little patchy. Even the colours seemed a bit faded. I fast forwarded it to an action sequence, and also noticed that there was a bit of ghosting and streaking as well. I shuddered to think what would happen when I popped Arkham Asylum into the PS3, but I put on my brave face, and did it anyway. The result was as I expected – Batman literally seemed to be dragging his feet while I played the game.