232V Build Quality and Remote Control

The Olevia 232V comes in a pretty standard rectangular cardboard box. While a removable lid would have made getting the display out a bit easier, I was able to get it out easy enough with a little help from my wife. Because this display was purchased and would be staying in my house permanently, we installed it in the recessed area over our fireplace.

The outer frame of the 232V is made of black plastic with a recessed black plastic frame around the 32” diagonal thin film transistor (TFT) liquid crystal display (LCD). On power up, a bright blue LED light comes on indicating that the display is receiving power. For those who find these lights to be irritating, the user menu will allow you to disable this light. The front of the display includes buttons along the bottom right that include: Power, Menu, Channel up and down, Volume up and down, and Source. The Olevia emblem is in raised silver on the bottom middle of the black plastic frame. The stand is also made of black plastic. Each of the two speakers are approximately 3 inches wide and run vertically along the left and right side of the display. Over all the build quality of the 232V seems very solid with a pleasant enough aesthetic.

The video and audio inputs are all located on the back panel of the television. They are set up in a down facing configuration and were fairly easy to access during my set up.

Remote Control

The remote control is of the standard, unimpressive variety and was easy enough to use during calibration and day-to-day use of the display. The remote control has individual buttons for some functions (lighting, aspect ratio, freeze frame, and favorite television channels. However, it only has a single button for the source so you have to toggle through all the potential inputs (VGA, VGA-component, Tuner, Composite, S-video, component, and HDMI) to switch sources. Fortunately there are not that many sources to select from, so it isn’t the headache it could be, but can still be irritating over time and makes for more difficult universal remote control programming. Other quirks involve scenarios where there are separate buttons, for example Display and Time, which appear to give you exactly the same information in default use. With space being such a precious commodity on a remote control, the Time button (presumably tied to the Sleep function) seemed superfluous.