Hyundai H‑LCD900 portable TV review: video without internet

It would seem, why buy a com­pact TV if you can get a tablet for the same price? It’s sim­ple: if you like to watch movies and shows, you will need a large amount of traf­fic for your tablet. More­over, not every­one and not every­where has high-qual­i­ty mobile Inter­net yet: even a cou­ple of tens of kilo­me­ters from Moscow there are areas with poor cov­er­age. A TV (even if it’s so small) is free video con­tent that you can get with­out a big invest­ment.

Here is one of the pos­si­ble options — the device Hyundai H‑LCD900 (hel­lo Hyundai Solaris own­ers) with a 9‑inch screen. The pack­age includes charg­ers for pow­er sup­ply from 220 and 12V net­works, a con­trol pan­el, a minia­ture anten­na and an AV cable for con­nect­ing video sources.

The main con­trol but­tons are locat­ed on the top pan­el. And the expla­na­tions for them are actu­al­ly on the back. This is not very con­ve­nient: you either have to remem­ber the assign­ments of the but­tons, or look in, tilt the TV and peek. Could you get out of the sit­u­a­tion by mak­ing but­tons of dif­fer­ent shapes, although here we are more like­ly to find fault — well, when was the last time you con­trolled the TV with but­tons on the case? There is also a remote con­trol, con­ve­nient and minia­ture.

The pow­er switch can be felt on the left side. All the nec­es­sary con­nec­tors are also there: USB, AV-in, microSD mem­o­ry card slot, and, of course, sock­ets for con­nect­ing an anten­na and pow­er. Behind there is also a fold­ing leg, which allows you to install the TV on a hor­i­zon­tal sur­face.

The TV can work with ana­log and dig­i­tal sig­nals (there is sup­port for DVB‑T/T2 stan­dard). A 1200 mAh bat­tery is mount­ed inside the device, so the absence of an exter­nal pow­er source will not inter­fere with watch­ing TV pro­grams.

The screen res­o­lu­tion is mod­est by today’s stan­dards (800 * 480), but the view­ing angles are large enough, so there will be no prob­lems with view­ing with the whole fam­i­ly or com­pa­ny. The vol­ume is also like­ly to be enough, unless, of course, you are not going to a con­struc­tion site. Oth­er­wise, you can either con­nect exter­nal speak­ers or use head­phones.

The list of set­tings is fair­ly stan­dard. You can adjust the image as need­ed (con­trast, bright­ness, sharp­ness, or just mode), set the shut­down time, or even set a pass­word. There are also sound set­tings, but they are rather arbi­trary: there is no par­tic­u­lar point in adjust­ing the fre­quen­cies, as well as try­ing to turn on the sur­round sound mode.

But the main ques­tion — how high-qual­i­ty image does the TV pro­vide? As prac­tice shows, it strong­ly depends on the place where you are going to watch the pro­grams, or rather, on the remote­ness of this place from the sig­nal source. After all, most often com­pact TVs are tak­en to pic­nics, to the coun­try house or just on a trip.

Do not expect mir­a­cles with the Hyundai H‑LCD900 either — a minia­ture anten­na can­not pro­vide sig­nal recep­tion at a dis­tance of sev­er­al tens of kilo­me­ters from the “tow­er”. True, in our office, from the win­dow of which the Ostank­i­no Tow­er is per­fect­ly vis­i­ble in all its glo­ry, the device, even with this anten­na, suc­cess­ful­ly caught 18 pro­grams, and demon­strat­ed them almost flaw­less­ly — of course, adjust­ed for the low res­o­lu­tion of the matrix. In the cen­ter of Moscow, only two chan­nels were found in accept­able qual­i­ty, in the south the same two were already work­ing with ter­ri­ble inter­fer­ence. We con­nect the gen­er­al house anten­na — and again the image with min­i­mal noise.

It was not pos­si­ble to start the video from the flash dri­ve the first time — the source was sim­ply not in the list. We turned to the man­u­fac­tur­er for help, and they sent us an “acti­va­tion code”: you need to press the keys “4”, “3”, “2”, “1” on the remote con­trol. It worked! The video plays with­out any prob­lems: the video we down­loaded in HD qual­i­ty “spun” with­out brakes. The built-in play­er allows you to per­form all the nec­es­sary oper­a­tions: scroll the video for­ward and back­ward, speed up play­back, set up repeat, dis­play sub­ti­tles … By the way, unlike tablets, you can con­nect a USB flash dri­ve direct­ly here.

What is the result? If you have a TV source and aren’t too picky about pic­ture qual­i­ty, the Hyundai H‑LCD900 is a good choice. Oth­er­wise, it’s bet­ter to look not even at anoth­er TV, but at a tablet, not Inter­net TV.

And here is use­ful infor­ma­tion about large TVs:

• Smart TV under threat: how mod­ern TVs are hacked
• How to secure­ly mount the TV on the wall?