The main failing is a disappointingly feeble way with blacks. Quite how the company arrived at that whopping contrast ratio figure is a mystery because, while peak whites are pretty scorching (sometimes overly so), blacks rarely delve deeper than darkest grey.

There is also very little in the way of gradation between varying shades, as witnessed by Harry Potter's wait for the Knight Bus in the Prisoner of Azkaban, in which a large amount of detail (particularly around the slavering dog-thing in the hedge) is lost to the general murk.

Still, the backlight is at least consistently distributed, thereby avoiding the distracting pooling effect that has plagued some other LCD sets we've seen recently.

Audio performance is reasonably faithful, but cranking it more than halfway up the slider tends to result in a bit of a shouty din. It's fine with television broadcasts, but soon finds its limit with more complicated movie soundtracks, proving unable to replicate adequately any real sense of depth.

The price isn't bad, but we can't help feeling that the same set, without those daft features and sold cheaper, might have been a rather more tempting proposition.

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