Bluesen 32" HD LED Television

My old television finally conked out. It was a Sony Trinitron I'd been using for the last 6-7 years and which I bought off Trade Me for $50. Back then I actually went out of my way to get a Sony Trinitron as they have such a good picture. I found one that had rarely been used and had a picture like new.

Now the old style televisions are out. TV's are no longer bulky and heavy. They're now light and flat.

I went down to Noel Leeming Appliances and bought the cheapest 32" I could find in the store. The find was a Bluesen BL32C11NZ for $299.99. I've got no idea who Bluesen are, but I figure for that sort of money I couldn't really miss. The last time I forked out for a new TV, I paid over $1,000.

Setting this TV up was a breeze. I've got a simple but older system and I needed to keep everything in play. It's all set up and working well. I would allocate about two hours to get it the way you like it, including all the fiddling with personal settings.

Firstly, I want to record using my VCR. This is because one of the children has a VCR for playing back tapes upstairs. Tapes are very handy. They're cheap, portable and simple.

To set up the Bluesen I attached the aerial cable to the aerial input on the side of the TV. Turned everything on and the TV found the analogue VCR on channel 1. This took maybe 2 minutes to do. Now I can watch Freeview through the VCR and into the TV. Doing this I can still record shows, but alas as I don't have a dual tuner, can't watch another channel while recording.

Like this - Rabbit ears aerial > aerial cable >Dish TV freeview terrestrial set top box > RCA connector > into back of the VCR > Aerial transfer cable > Bluesen TV.

From source the feed is found under ATV.

Then to connect up the DVD player. This is an old one and does not come with HDMI. It is RCA red/white audio and yellow video like the cables that connect the set top box with the VCR.

DVD > RCA cable > TV audio left and right and video at back of TV. The DVD feed can be picked up on source AV, right below ATV.

Initially I scrolled down source menu too far and got DVD in black and white only on another source feed (which I thought was interesting). Found the colour line right below the TV channel in the on-screen menu - D'uh.

Picture quality is favourable. As this set is Asian in origin, the colours tend toward red, and brightness.

I customised the settings thus:-

From the set top box balanced brightness and contrast. Set HD resolution to Native.

On the TV, for picture, personalised and backed off from Dynamic setting a tad.

Colour temperature, backed off red and blue, enhanced green. The Asian colour palette sees a lot of red and they think blue cools things off. Green and blue are really similar, so I change the green by raising it in proportion to blue. At the moment I have red 40, green 50, blue 40. With a setting like this you get less of a chocolate box effect.

Aspect ratio. The standard setting is to have 1080i HD resolution and 16:9 from the set top box and 16:9 on the TV. I sit quite close to the TV so I went with 4:3 letterbox from the set top box into 4:3 on the TV (anything else on the TV and it distorts, be careful). I noticed a slight improvement in picture quality by setting HD resolution to Native.

Turned off noise reduction.

The picture is acceptable, though nothing can compete with the venerable Trinitron.

Sound from the Bluesen is crappy. Very tinny, lots of treble. I actually went down to zero treble and up to 100 bass, then sat the TV on a soft surface to adsorb sound from the speakers which emit sound from the base and downward. I had noticed the sound was bouncing off the table the TV was sitting on. The sound is better but still not very good. This is the Bluesen's worst feature.

Horrors, when I first turned the TV off and then switched on again, the channel it was tuned in on, just the one analogue feed from the VCR, had been lost. Ouch. Checked online to find this is a common problem with modern TV's. It's the software not loading correctly. Funny thing, while I could retune and all settings were then remembered, I turned the TV off a couple of times and each time I restarted I had to quickly retune that channel in again. It's as if part of the thing had saved but another hadn't.

Solution was to restore factory defaults (which didn't change the clock - funny that). Then when I tuned the channel in after restoring factory defaults, the channel stored in memory and goes to this one channel when restarted. Phew. This could be a glitch and the restoring of the factory defaults may need to be done again. I'll watch for this and if it happens again then I'll be quick to squeal.

[Update @ 09/10/2018: the TV is still working fine. It has turned out to be a bargain. The Dish TV set top box died pretty quickly, turns out they're rubbish. I needed this to receive the digital signal and to convert that signal to analogue so my VCR could record. So I don't do that now, I simply watch the TV alone. It is theoretically possible play back videos on the VCR but I don't do that either as the TV often needs to auto tune the channels in and once I do that I also need to retune the VCR channel and that's just a pain. So videotapes are only watched by the kids upstairs from old stock and we don't record any more at all. Instead we watch DVD's which can be bought very cheaply, especially old movies.]