ONIDA Xaria 32 LCD TV

Onida will always be remembered for its cheeky ads; mainly the ones starring the bald devil. This Indian brand often comes to mind when Mr Upwardly Mobile realizes he can’t afford that shiny new Korean TV after all. To gladden the hearts of such folk, Onida has come out with its new range of Xaria LCD TVs. And we at Tech2.0 recently got the Xaria LO32XRGBB for review. So how does it stack up? Let's find out.

Form factor
Onida has been innovative with the bezel, which will attract the style-conscious – especially women who like to color-coordinate gadgets with the furniture and curtains. The bezel comes in three shades, including a dark orange. Thankfully we got a bluish-gray piece, and it looks good. Apart from the bezel, the frame is glossy black. The sides are quite thick, making the TV look larger than the screen indicates. The flush, touch-sensitive controls look good too.

The back panel looked surprisingly empty, which prompted me to look closely at the sides. Yes, all the connections are on the left side, leaving the back panel bare. The connections include 2 HDMIs, a PC (VGA)-in, and a stream of component/composite-ins. It's the regular stuff that you would find in a 32-inch LCD.

One point I noted in the specs is the inclusion of a Faroudja image processing chip, which Onida is marketing as 'VisD'. Faroudja is a manufacturer of image processor chips, which are found in many good DVD players. VisD claims to do the 'intense notching up' of image quality, like all foreign brands that do the same for their respective image processing technologies.

The response time is 8ms, while the contrast is 8000:1 (dynamic). These ratings may seem to be on the lower side, but high ratings don't really mean much – as far as I'm concerned, it's the performance that matters, rather than impressive contrast ratios and response times.

I tend to gloss over the sound, as TVs usually sound like crap. But Onida seems to have concentrated on the audio, at least on paper. The specs state something called a 'MeloD' processing engine for the sound, which includes some DSP tricks.