Get it on, Bang Acon(da), Get it on!

Every now and then I get a hand me down thats pretty cool. Recently I got a Loewe Aconda TV , it didnt work and I got it repaired for 150 cdn and I'm glad I did. This is a West German TV from 2002, and it weighs approximately one million pounds. I have the say, the picture on this thing is amazing and in terms of interface, I've never seen anything quite like it. when you do the setup it actually has pretty elaborate animations to tell you how to hook up your HD Receivers, dvd players, camcorders and computers.


I hooked up my gamecube and my iBook G4 Laptop and I was really impressed by the sound and picture quality. I noticed my 16x9 wasn't very wide at all so I made adjustments in the service menu (hit "menu" on TV and then "menu" on remote and your in) and now I am using about 97 percent of the screen, meh, nothing is perfect.


I watched some regular TV on it and noticed that the screen size would keep changing on it own on certain channels, I realized that the TV is detecting the letterbox programs and commercials and auto resizing to show the programing in wide screen, found the setting but decided to leave it on, its kinda neat.


I played some mario super strikers and after that I turned off the TV, the sound fades, screen dims and the picture closes inward like a movie curtain, kinda creeped me out. Nice thing is you can turn all these little "features" off if you want it like that.



My ratings:

Picture: 5/5 I really can't fault the picture, its a damn computer monitor, it looks good, the side by side split screen is really good in the 16x9, the preset video settings are well balanced.

Sound: 5/5 sound was full and would be suitable for even a larger room, again the presets were pretty good and the individual settings were nice.

Inputs: 3/5 you can plug in lots of things, but only one component in and one VGA and No DVI? this probably was more than enough in 2002 but in 2006, I need like 5 component in, HDMI and other goodnesses.

Value: 1/5 Canadian Hifi sells this for over 5g? thats outta control, they say the MSRP is 8g? I call bullshit.. for far less you can get pretty awesome TV's these days, perhaps not made in West Germany, maybe without some of the nice little things this TV offers. thats being said, if you could get one of these for less (150 was perfect for me, cause I'm just a lowly labourer) I would say, yes its an awesome TV that will rub you right way.

Overall: 4/5 (not an average) I wouldn't have this under other circumstances, but I do have it, think its great. I know people gripe about how in depth the menu's are but I like that you can control so much and do shit like rename the inputs, little stupid things like that, the fade out, there's a nifty channel surf grid system thats kinda cool, the remote isnt too busy which is good cause it isnt illuminated.