Olevia 542i Input Configuration and Using the Television

The 542i has this neat little wheel GUI for a user interface that is supposed to be intuitive and user friendly. I personally have mixed feelings about this interface. On the pro side, it is pretty, it is mostly intuitive, and there are a ton of options. The interface is small and unobtrusive so it didn't interfere when I was taking measurements and in fact didn't even bother my wife that much when I made adjustments while watching TV. On the con side, regardless if I press up or down, I can never seem to get to the menu that I think I should be getting to. There are no numbers associated with the adjustments (just a bar) so you don't really know exactly what your settings are. Having a three year old with a fixation on remotes means that I tend to write down all my setting for the eventuality that he messes them up (notice I said eventuality).

When viewing standard definition television or really anything that isn't already scaled to your screen size, you're going to have to rely on the internal scalers of the unit. The Olevia 542i has no shortage of picture manipulations. One thing I really like is the H. Position , V. Position , and Cropping functions. Being able to adjust the horizontal and vertical position of the picture can sometimes be an invaluable tool. When I sent the unit a 480i signal, I found that the Cropping function really cleaned up the edges well. In some cases it eliminated a few rows of unused pixels and often it would remove some noise around the edges of a 480i signal. My only real problem with the unit is that you couldn't use the PiP and flip between the two Component inputs. You could PiP between one of the Components and the HDMI, but not between the two Components.

There are a number of different Aspect Ratios you can chose when you watch a standard definition source (most likely a 4:3 picture). I've outlined them below for your convenience:

• Aspect - Flips between a 16:9 ratio and a 4:3 ratio
• Full Screen - Stretches a 4:3 picture to the full 16:9 screen
• Panoramic - Stretches horizontally only
• Zoom 1 - Stretches horizontally and vertically
• Zoom 2 - Stretches horizontally and vertically but more - you'll lose part of the picture this way
• 1:1 Mode - Puts the picture up there mapped 1 to 1 - no scaling involved.

As you can see below, the configuration options are plentiful. I set the Lighting to Medium , the Power Up to Home , I turned Off the Black Extender and set Noise Reduction to High (even though these settings seemed to have little effect on the picture quality overall) but turned off everything else under Idea. I used the 6500_User menu to calibrate the color. I played with the Contrast Enhancer , the White Peak Limiter, the Flesh Tone, and some of the others but I noticed no real effect. My guess is that these settings will make a poorly calibrated display look better. One exception was the Adaptive Luma Control which crushed the blacks and made everyone look a little plastic. It did make fire look a bit better but the other effects negated this benefit.

My only real issues with using this display were the turn on time and the Factory Settings option. From the time I pressed the power on button till the time I saw a picture on the screen was over 14 seconds. Personally, that is just far too long. The irritating thing was that it didn't even matter if the unit was recently on. It would still take the same amount of time to power it back up. The Factory Settings option resets your display to the factory settings (duh!). The problem is that there is no confirmation. Near the end of this review, as I was surfing around the GUI, I decided to see what the options were under this menu and reset all my calibration. Not even an "Are you SURE?" message. With something that can undo as much work as I put into getting the picture right on this display, it should be harder to reset everything. Remember when I complained that my son would eventually mess up my settings? Well, apparently I meant me.

Remote

The remote for the Olevia 542i is functional for the most part. The remote is a bit light in the hand but is fairly comfortable to hold. It is backlit though many of the buttons were labeled on the body of the remote rather than on button so they were nearly unreadable in the dark. The remote is a universal so it can be programmed with up to seven additional devices. There are twelve itty bitty buttons under the volume/channel buttons for many of the display's functions like PiP and changing aspects. Even with a bit of memorization and the fingers of a master pianist, you're going to hit the wrong button from time to time. Don't get me wrong, I like that they were included, I just wish they were a bit more usable without a Palm Pilot stylus.

The Olevia 542i has a lot of inputs to choose from though there are only two ways to cycle through them. You can either use the GUI (which takes four button presses to get you to the right menu) or you can cycle through them by repeatedly hitting the Source button. Neither is a very good option. I would much rather have a number of dedicated buttons for each of the inputs. Even if they were small (like the ones I was just complaining about) I would much prefer that to the incessant scrolling. For the different sources there is kind of a neat system that includes dedicated buttons for seven components (three assignable) and a scroll feature. That would have worked well for switching inputs as well. It seemed to be a pretty good system to me.

Speakers

I had the unit connected to the Oppo DV-970HD via HDMI so I went ahead and threw in a CD to test out the speakers. On a whim I chose Euphoria's Precious Things . I've recently acquired this album so I'm just now getting familiar with it, but so far I like what I hear. It has some pretty nice elements for reviewing speakers including a decent amount of low end, some nice use of the two-channel format, and a good mix of instrumental and vocal tracks. Not to mention that Tracy Bonham (who I was introduced to during my review of The Blue Man Group: The Complex ) sings on two tracks. I'll be talking more about this album in future reviews of equipment that will do this album justice. The speakers included with the Olevia 542i had an anemic bass response, rolled off high end, and an overall tinny quality. They would probably be OK for the highly compressed sound indicative of analogue cable TV, but that is about it. If you are going to spend $2k on a display, do yourself a favor and at least pick up a good two-channel setup to go with it.