Some TVs stand out from the crowd with their designs, while others rely on their features. Others use high performance levels to tempt you.

The Hannspree XV32 GT, though, goes the classic price route, reeling you in with the promise of 32in of good-looking flatscreen LCD TV for just £400.

That’s even cheaper at the time of writing – albeit only by a quid – than the latest 32in LCD TV from archetypal budget brand, Goodmans.

An attractive LCD with an even more attractive price

Given its Taiwanese origins, we frankly expected the Hannspree XV32 GT to be short of a few of the features we normally take for granted on a UK-manufactured TV, given its price.

But actually, all the key bases seem covered. For starters, it’s HD Ready, thanks to a native resolution of 1,366 x 768 pixels and carriage of the necessary HDMI and component video inputs.

In fact, it has a pair of v1.2 HDMIs – as many as numerous TVs costing more than double. Two other XV32 features that certainly can’t be taken for granted at £399 are the provision of a PC input, plus a built-in digital tuner complete with adequate electronic programme guide support and even a digital audio output.

Some interesting features from Hannspree

Unusually, the set employs separate RF inputs for the TV’s analogue and digital tuners. But other than potentially requiring you to get an RF splitter, if you desperately want the analogue tuner as well as the digital one, this dual RF situation is no great problem.

As with various other megabudget LCD TVs, the Hannspree XV32 doesn’t carry a CAM slot for adding the Top Up TV subscription service. But we don’t anticipate that many of our discerning readers will miss this.

The XV32’s decently presented onscreen menus contain more picture and sound fine-tuning flexibility than we’d expected.

Cheap TV doesn't mean lack of features

For instance, there’s a series of quite carefully calibrated image presets; a 1:1 playback mode for optimising 720p HD sources (if you can find any) and a facility for manually adjusting the TV’s backlight output.

There’s no automatic backlight adjustment for black level optimisation, as sported by many more expensive TVs these days. But the screen’s native contrast ratio is quoted at a respectable 1,200:1 all the same, and the lack of auto backlight adjustment should at least make the picture more stable.

The final positive feature of the XV32 GT is its design, which is far more attractive than the majority of cheap screens currently available.

A user-friendly set

Not surprisingly the XV32 GT’s remote is nothing special in terms of build quality. But its layout is fine, and it works well with the onscreen menus.

In other words, aside from the split RF input, it’s hard to see how the XV32 GT could be much easier to handle.

Usual LCD picture weaknesses

Scoring the XV32 GT’s picture is rather difficult. For while, on the one hand, a couple of arguably inevitable weaknesses stop it from rivalling the best high-price LCD televisions, it certainly stands out proudly from practically all of the budget competition.

Let’s cover the bad news first. The two weaknesses we referred to are those classic LCD ones of black level response and motion smearing.

Regarding the former, really dark movie scenes tend to look as if they’re taking place behind a grey veil as the TV struggles to resolve a deep black.

We’ve certainly seen far worse examples of this in the budget world, but there’s also no denying that many costlier sets now handle black levels better.