You’d think that televisions are all essentially just the same, and on the surface, you’d be mostly right.  Mostly.  It’s the finer distinctions that separate one television from another, and in the case of the 42 inch Sylvania LCD, it’ll all be down sides.

Watching the 42 inch Sylvania LCD made me wonder if that particular model had suffered a tragic case of burn-in at the factory.  The screen itself seemed washed out, and every color had that unpleasant pastel look to it.  In fact, compared to a lot of other televisions, it had lesser clarity of image and lesser sound quality from its two side-mounted speakers.  Sadly, the only thing that this television improves on is the price–in an upward direction.  This miserable wreck of a television actually retailed for nine hundred bucks in one shop I found it available.  Nine hundred bucks!  For a forty two inch television in this economy, that’s bad enough, but to get anything less than high quality for that kind of money is just adding insult to injury.

You can do vastly better, just about anywhere, than the 42 inch Sylvania LCD could bring to market.  In many cases you can get much more television for much less money, even if you have to accept a slightly smaller screen it’ll at least manage to turn out a decent picture with good sound quality. The model I managed to see, on the other hand, won’t do either.