Polaroid, the brand most famous for producing those instant cameras so popular with partygoers and pranksters, has branched out into LCD televisions. The TLU-03723B is an ultra affordable set and looks that way, with a flimsy and unattractive chassis of matt black plastic, but no-one's ever won five stars just for being pretty.

Features

A short features list is presumably one of the keys to that low price. It's HD Ready, has a digital tuner and a pair of HDMI inputs. And that's about your lot. The frame is detachable from its stand as are the speakers from the frame, which is handy if you want to wall-mount.

Ease of use

You'd think one of the first criteria of an entry-level set would be mass market user friendliness, but in this case you'd be reckoning without some truly bizarre design decisions.

The twin HDMI inputs are, for some reason, tucked away up in the top left corner of the back panel, thereby ensuring that the most important connections are about as far as they could possibly be from any video sources. There's not a hell of lot of room around the jacks themselves, either, which might cause problems for chunky, heavily insulated leads.

The remote, meanwhile, is ugly in black and off-white, with small buttons, obscure labelling and a general lack of pictograms necessitating a quick browse through the manual before setup is attempted. The menu system, with its primitive GUI and blocky type, harks back to less enlightened times, which would be acceptable if the system itself was intuitive and flexible, but it isn't.

Pre-sets are rather uninspired, sliders top out at '63' for some bizarre reason and subsections only remain open for a few seconds before either disappearing or taking you back to the previous screen before you are ready.

Picture

You'd think picture quality would be pretty key for a company such as Polaroid, but there's precious little evidence of it here.

There's very little that's right with the TLU-03723B. At a push, the colours are reasonably bold, with our DVD of The Fast and the Furious coming across in suitably brash manner. Blacks aren't too bad either, with Underworld on HD DVD benefiting from a palette able to reach down to a respectable level of gloom.