Westinghouse LD-3255AR 32-Inch 720p LED HDTV, Black

• 720p LED HDTV
• Slim – 1.0″ edge design and feather light 14.6 pounds
• Eco – Energy Star 5.0 compliant, uses 10% less energy than a 60 watt light bulb
• Vivid color – 100,000:1 contrast ratio, 22% increased color gamut
• No Mercury, No lead, recylced/recyclable packaging printed with soy-based inks

Vivid colors, feather-light and energy efficient – the 32″ Westinghouse LED TV lets you live large for a small priceA dazzling picture, low energy consumption, and ultra-slim profile combine to make the 32-Inch Westinghouse 720p LED HDTV a versatile fit for virtually any space. Its brilliant color and vivid details deliver a high-end viewing experience, while its thin, lightweight design makes it unobtrusive and ideal for hanging. In addition, multiple inputs make it easy to connect to cable services, media players, game consoles, and even a camera or PC.

Customer Reviews

I will start with the positives on this unit. When the TV first arrived I was super excited. The manufacturer packaging is very solid, and easy to open/remove. As the box noted, the TV uses LESS energy than a 60 watt lightbulb. This is huge for me (and the environment) because every time I add a new big gadget to my home I can always see an increase electric bill. My audio receiver, my Tivo, and my 40 inch LCD TV are all HUGE power suckers. It’s nice to have a TV that produces such a bright and crystal clear picture that isn’t going to have a noticeable impact on my electric bill. Speaking of the picture, it’s beautiful. Noticeably better than my high-end Sony LCD TV which is about 1.5 years old. For a TV at this price point, I was very pleased. How they managed to get a TV with this amazing of picture quality so thin, so light, and so eco-friendly is amazing. Unfortunately, this is where the pro’s stop. Westinghouse did such an outstanding of creating a thin, lightweight LED TV with amazing picture quality, but for some reason they decided to not care about any of the small details.

Unlike many LED/LCD tv’s these days, the stand does not “snap in” in any way, rather you must just balance the TV on the stand while you are screwing it into place. Unless you have 3 arms, this means you need two people to get the TV on the stand. Not a huge deal, but even a cheap Dynex TV from Best Buy only requires one person to set up. Also, the included Westinghouse remote is not the nicest thing I’ve ever seen. Sure it gets the job done, but I find the volume and channel buttons to be located inconveniently, and the menu button is always a search to find since it is not labeled “menu” but rather has some illegible icon on it. Worse yet, this TV has composite inputs but no component inputs. Sure there is a VGA input and they threw in a component to VGA adapter, but I dislike using adapters- why lose picture quality when I don’t have to? Also, the TV tuner coaxial input is so tight against the back of the TV that it is VERY hard to screw in a coaxial cable, it took me (no lie I timed it) 7 minutes to successfully screw a coaxial cable into the TV. Maybe if I busted out a pliers I could have gotten it in easier than with my hands, but why should I have to that Westinghouse, why???

Now all of these complaints are minor details, and probably would have been completely forgiven and gone unmentioned in this review if it wasn’t for the audio on the TV. This is the real killer. To be fair, based on how thin the TV is, it’s amazing they even got speakers in the thing at all. But I’d trade another quarter of an inch for some speakers with even a little quality. Any term you’ve ever heard to describe bad sound can be used to describe the sound on this TV. Hollow sounding, tin sounding, echo, unbalanced, choppy, I could continue but you get the idea. I figured I could get around this by connecting my surround sound system into the mix, but at that point, the sound started getting static. Yes static. Are we in the 1960′s? My goodness. I did end up installing the Westinghouse firmware update, but all it did was make things a bit louder. No firmware update is going to change bad speakers, and a low end processor.

It’s really a shock that anybody at Westinghouse decided it would be a good idea to send this TV out for review. It’s a model that would be more well-suited for sale at a store where the salesman can talk it up all day and you’ll never see a customer review before purchase. Based on what I’ve said here, it seems like my score of a 4 is VERY generous (which it is), but at the end of the day, the TV does have EXCELLENT (far above the competition) picture quality, and Westinghouse claims that what they send out via Vine was a early production unit. I’m hoping that they will take this feedback and make some changes before they start shipping to customers. As of now, I can’t recommend the TV but if they do manage to make a couple minor fixes, the TV has great potential. I will update this review as necessary should things change (or not change) when they release the final unit.

Update 9/2/10:

After talking to Westinghouse technical support about my “static” issues with my external speakers, they told me that the audio outputs on the TV are not amplified, so I would need to purchase an amplifier to get the expected use of the external speakers. After looking around on Amazon, this looks to be an additional fifty bucks (minimum), so you may want to add that to the price of the TV if you are planning on connecting speakers. I still stand by the 4 star review and will continue to update as necessary.

Update 11/7/10:

Well, after using the TV for a few months now, I’ve actually gotten used to the TV’s bad sound. For the price Amazon is currently selling the TV for, this is probably a decent choice for anyone who isn’t an audio…

I REALLY want to give this TV a better rating. The picture clarity, the look, the thin casing, the setup – all great. But I can’t hear much at all. This is a secondary TV so it does not have the benefit of being hooked up to my surround sound system. I did hook it up to additional speakers and the sound is passable, it’s just not much above average. I can’t imagine a 32″ TV would be the primary unit in most households – meaning it probably wouldn’t get the full sound system treatment. The fact that I couldn’t just stick this in my kitchen and let ‘er rip is a major bummer for me. I could go on about the Energy Star rating and the helpful two HDMI ports, but I fear they don’t mean much in the end.

Bottom line: if you have a nice sound system to hook this up to, the picture quality is great and you may have no issues (although based on other reviews you may still need an amp or have subpar audio). If you are looking for a standalone TV that doesn’t take up a lot of space – look elsewhere for better audio.

The first thing that struck me about this TV is how lightweight and easy to carry it is. The packaging for the TV was sturdy and easy to open – the box even had instructions on it for how to open and remove the TV.

The set up for the TV was minimal. There are three screws that need to go on the base, which means this is best done with two people – one holding the TV and one securing the screws in the base. There’s also an AC adapter that needs to be plugged in to the TV and the wall. The TV can also be mounted on the wall but the mount must be bought separately.

The programming of the TV was also minimal – the TV will prompt you for the source of cable/satellite/antenna, etc. For the purposes of writing a comprehensive review, I set up the cable and then changed the settings and set up an antenna with a decoder. When the TV is connected to an antenna with a decoder, there’s a 10-20 second lag time when switching the channels.

The TV is stylish and sleek. And super thin. The LED is a great selling point – it’s eco-friendly and is supposed to use less electricity than a 60-watt bulb.

The biggest downside to this TV is the range of the remote, which only works at about ten feet. Therefore, this TV would be suitable in the bedroom, the kitchen, or elsewhere, where one doesn’t have to get up off the couch to change the channel. At 31.5-inches, this TV would be ideal as a TV for a small apartment/dorm.

The colors are beautiful and it is foreseeable that in terms of picture quality, Westinghouse could compete with the latest Sony/Toshiba televisions.

Another big con is the audio, which is subpar at best. I noticed a need to constantly adjust volume, regardless of the channel/program/setting.

Although the audio and the remote are an issue, I would venture to sat that the TV is still an adequate unit for the price.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, January 16th, 2011 at 5:03 am and is filed under Westinghouse. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.