Why You Can Trust CNET Kogan 1080P37 review: Kogan 1080P37
Kogan's 37-inch Full HD panel is inexpensive and should appeal to budget sensibilities, but it's not great for those who demand visual fidelity.
Design
It might sound like the lead-in to a badly written, badly dated Hey Hey It's Saturday joke, but Kogan's line of LCD TVs do all really tend to look the same. The same cheap but inoffensive piano black plastic front. The same lightweight circular base. It's not a terrible design by any stretch of the imagination, and at a certain level all TV panels are going to look the same, but it's also not a stunning bit of living room art.
Kogan 1080P37
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The remote control's a similarly nondescript bit of kit with a directional control sitting above the channel and volume buttons. These are curiously small, and we say curiously small because channel and volume changing are always going to be the most frequently used buttons on any remote. Why a remote would deliberately make them tiny eludes us, although Kogan's not the only offender in this category.
As with the rest of Kogan's product lines, instead of a manual for the 1080P37 you get a slip of paper directing you to the online version which you can print out yourself. We appreciate the innate green nature of this approach, and we're not blind to the cost-saving the company's making at the same time. But on the flip side of that slip of paper why couldn't it give a simple quick set-up routine as well escapes us.
Features
Now, what does it really look like underneath that cheap plastic? Well, on paper, the 1080P37 is, as the name suggests, a 37-inch LCD TV with support for 1080p resolution playback via compatible devices. This means it's the same size as the infamous "Kevin37" LCD TV Kogan was selling earlier in the year, but with a higher supported resolution. You don't get a T-shirt with this model, however.
Kogan's mantra still remains buying cheap and selling cheap, and this means that the company's products are rarely technology trendsetters. The 1080P37's no exception in this regard. While the market in brand names is shifting to 200MHz models, the 1080P37 is a 120MHz panel — a dead-giveaway that this panel is designed for overseas markets as Australian models use 100Hz. The value of a faster "motion compensation" engine could come down to visual perception, and some customers might not notice the difference between a 200MHz and a 120MHz panel at all. Kogan's specifications suggest a dynamic contrast ratio of 10,000:1 and an actual contrast ratio of a more modest and probably accurate 1300:1.
From a connection perspective, the 1080P37 supports component, composite, S-Video, two HDMI and a single VGA connection, with optical audio output support. If you're not sending audio out to an amp or sound system then stereo 10-Watt speakers power the 1080P37's in-built audio.
Performance
The very first thing we noticed with the 1080P37 when powering it up was a flaw we noticed in an earlier Kogan 42-inch LCD TV. Specifically, there was an obvious spot in the upper left-hand corner where the LCD backlight spilled over into the image, leaving a very bright corner obvious in most scenes. We were able to lessen its effect by switching the picture mode away from the default Dynamic mode to the more usable Standard, but once seen we couldn't ignore its presence.
Unlike the previous Kogan, we had few problems with the remote control. The menu structure has a cute but rather limited circular OSD that's at least simple to navigate, if somewhat lacking in fine-tuning controls.
Testing with standard digital TV and games, the 1080P37 performed quite well, and with actual 1080p material results were passable if not great. Spinning the Blu-ray version of Iron Man we noticed crisp still details but some motion judder, and dark sequences of the film (such as the flight testing at the 1:03:30 mark) showed uneven blacks, especially around the bright top corner.
One thing we were impressed with were the speakers. They're never going to replace a full home theatre system, but for basic TV watching or gaming they were crisp and accurate enough.
As with most of the rest of Kogan's range, while the price you pay is attractively low, there's a price to pay in terms of overall quality. As a gaming/digital TV panel, the 1080P37 is a worthwhile consideration, but those who want high quality, high definition should look elsewhere.