Got this in the junk mail today
40" Full HD LED TV Viewable Screen
Full HD Resolution - 1980 x 1080
Built in HD Tuner
3 x HDMI Input
PVR Recording Via USB
1 x AV Input (Composite / Component)
1 x VGA Input + 1 x Audio Input
1 x Headphone Jack
50 & 60 Hz, Direct LED
10W Sound
2500:1 Contrast ratio
Supports MKV, MP4, MP3 & others(?) (Let us know in the comments)
4.5 Star Energy Rating
2 year warranty
While stocks last
1 per customer
In store only
Available nationwide.
Dupe
Just bought one from Bondi junction. There were about 2 left. At least one other person looking.
They have a 4.5 star energy rating, which is a bonus I guess
Excellent energy rating on this tv which was a pleasant surprise. So far I'm extremely happy with the quality and picture.
Can someone tell me if the antenna cable is included and what sort of plug on the wall-side.
Never is. Wall side? Depends on your wall lol
Good post. My niece scored one early this morning and she is thoroughly pleased.
What a… professional!
You forgot the quotation marks around "professional" ;)
There should be a comments section on Gumtree where we can post a link to this deal! :)
Does anybody know the height and width (with stand). I don't want to take it out of the box if it isn't going to fit :) Thanks
61cm tall x 94cm wide with stand
thanks
comes with free screwdriver lol
This is bonus which they haven't even mentioned in their add :)
it's a fantastic TV, power consumption is only 50 watts.
That seems too low. Did you use one of those watt meters to get that reading?
If that's the case, could you be so kind as telling us the standby wattage and average wattage (kW/h) with 100% brightness over a standard TV show or movie? I find the manufactures specs are often to one side or the other compared to what a watt meter will read.
My watt meter died a few weeks ago :(
I was thinking of bringing a UPS from work to home as it allows watt readings over USB, but if you could tell me those values it would be helpful, and for science!
yes, i did, standby is .3 and average is 47-48w, very impressive.
Got one for my grandma from Bondi Junction this morning. Guessing they are sold out there now as there were only 5 units and a few people arrived at 7am. I can confirm they are sold out at Alexandria and Mosman too. Wanted to try to get one for my mum too but had no further luck.
For those who bought it and had a chance to look at the Soniq from JB as well, which one is better?
Drove nearly 1 hour and got the last one from Mona Vale store, sweet;)
Are they wall mountable? What is the thickness/depth?
question is, can you still find any stock at the moment?
I am looking for a low power TV in this size and the ones I have been able to test in store are 70-100W. I can probably find someone selling theirs even if it's more than $299, as long as it's wall mountable and not too thick. I think it's the same one as on the Kogan website - http://www.kogan.com/au/buy/40-led-tv-full-hd/ can anyone confirm?
Looks exactly the same. Even the remote buttons are exactly same except the logo
you may also want to consider this TV as well.
http://www.jbhifi.com.au/tv-lcd-led-plasma/soniq/40-inch-ful…
$349 at JB
My money would be on the Akai, the Kogan and the Soniq all being the same TV just rebadged for those brands.
There are subtle differences in the inputs and outputs on all these TV's - like optical vs coax digital output, headphone output, perhaps software differences as well. JB seems to sell 2 similar models, E40W13A and E40W13C.
Are you saying the Akai would have better picture quality?
Picked up one from North Ryde yesterday afternoon. I called first thing in the morning and convinced the guy to hold one for me until I could get off work ;)
Pretty happy with it so far. Weird it doesn't have a proper audio output to connect to a stereo… just a headphone jack… but I can work with it for such a good price :)
Quality is not excellent but again for the price it's decent.
The quality of my Toppy through RCA cables isn't that good so I've ordered an HDMI so that should hopefully improve things…
You sure it doesn't have optical out? Only asking because someone said it's identical to the Kogan one which has optical.
It has coax out out above the USB port on the side.
Not too sure about the optical port, maybe the headphone port doubles as an optical port but I'm not able to test that out at the moment.
No optical confirmed
All the mp4's and mkv's that I have tried have been unsupported by the internal decoder. That includes all YIFY content from the last few years which is a bummer. It would also sometimes 'freeze' my TV when trying to create thumbnails for the unsupported media which would be unresponsive until it puts itself into standby and then reboots itself.
The sound is pretty hollow and lacks any low range but the faux surround option actually doesn't sound half bad.
The EPG is passable and that's the way I would describe the remote too (just a little too clicky but I think that will get better over time).
There is no way to adjust the backlight. It appears the brightness setting just reduces the black level dynamic range by raising blacks to grays and lifts all other colours to white.
Now that all the bad is out of the way I can focus on the good.
The picture quality is fantastic. The colours out of the box are very good, which they would have to be because there's no real option to change them besides temperature and saturation which doesn't exactly allow for fine tuning. The skin tones might be a little on the yelloweygreeney side though but I need to watch Blu Ray content before I call skin tone representation over DVB.
Brightness. As weird as it sounds it feels like the goldilocks of LED backlight brightness. I was using it late last night in the dark and today when the room had heaps leaking in and the brightness just felt right. Which is a good thing because you can't adjust it. I wonder if it dynamically shifts based on the ambient light?
The way it handles motion is fantastic. I'm so used to seeing ugly motion stepping in panning scenes that it's great to have something that holds a frame without breaking apart during fast panning motion. It also holds resolution while panning due to a fast LCD response time.
A good amount of inputs. There's 3x HDMI, a VGA, RF, and a AV port that doubles as both composite and component (but can't use both at the same time). I would have liked to have seen a dedicated composite along with 2x component inputs, a DVI connection and an S video port too.
Input lag. Playing some GTA5 on Xbox over component cables was great. I didn't notice any if it was there.
Power. User 'no_mercy'' above used a watt meter and found the average power draw to be 50w/Hrs. This is ridiculously low and pretty awesome.
Overall I am really happy with it. It's replacing a 32" 1366x768 Soniq TV that was bought in 2008 so whilst it's not going to be my #1 screen, it's still bloody awesome for $300.
HDMI is basically a DVI + audio.
I played MKV,AVI(both H264 encoded),MP4 and even RMVB on this TV, mostly are 720P,no problem at all.
Well aware. Problem is if you have a laptop that supports DVI out then you can't hook it by DVI->HDMI and have the sound sent to the TV also.
It supports this over VGA as there is a dedicated sound input for that connection.
Unfortunately for me, my old laptop (which I use as an HTPC partly due to having an internal blu ray drive) only has DVI out. I either use the laptop speakers for sound or hook it into a sound system, can't use the TV speaker.
All my 264 content isn't supported under mp4 or mkv container. They are all 720-1080 YIFY content.
Why don't you connect a 3.5mm audio cable from the headphone/audio out jack of your laptop into the "audio in" port on the back of the TV? This will definitely route the audio through the TV speakers, provided you change the source input to "PC Mode".
Then get a DVI-VGA adapter and run a VGA lead into the back of the "VGA in" port on the TV.
This is exact setup I use to run my computer through the new 40" screen which replaces a 22" LCD monitor I was using previously. The only limitation is that the max resolution using VGA connection is 1024x768. My computer is 5 years old and doesn't support HDMI, hence why I am using the above method.
I actually ended up doing this before you said it.
Works fine but the 3.5mm input doesn't have a LC pass filter on it, it picks up a lot of ultra high pitched noise that sounded like dog whistles going off.
I found an older cable with some ferrite cores along the length which cut out ~90% of the noise but it's still there a little bit which is a shame. It's only on the 3.5mm VGA audio input which isn't a big issue.
del
Great review. Thanks mate. It reaffirms my satisfied purchase.
Hi c0balt, have you found the surround sound "scratchy"? It enhances the sound but I am getting a bit of feedback - not listenable, so I cant use the surround sound options.. the picture quality is great.. I hooked it up via HDMI to my lappy and I was very impressed!
I'm having a bit of an issue with the arial/in-built DTV tuner. It is picking up a perfect signal and all is fine but for some strange reason If I change channels too many times(aka channel surfing) it will sometimes start scrambling/jumbling/clipping every channel. e.g. Last night, I was watching a channel and then started flicking around until I landed on "7 Mate" and then it started acting up on me. The only way to fix this issue is to perform a channel re-scan. Manual re-scan fixes it and takes 1/4 of the time required to perform a full auto scan cycle but I shouldn't be doing this!
This is the 3rd time now and it is getting really annoying and doesn't make any sense why this would be happening. I seldom even watch FTA(mostly DVDs, PC,xbox360) but this is just not good enough.
Should I replace the cable with a new one or any other troubleshooting tips before I escalate this further? I really don't want to lug my new panel back to OW for warranty repairs. I'm even content living with 3 dead pixels for this price because everything else is flawless and wonderful, but c'mon even I have a tolerance threshold.
HMM I really dont know.. your suggestion of changing the cable sounds logical, just borrow one from a friend I guess..
In regards to my problem LOL.. is your surround sound "perfect" ?
I have to say the picture quality is spot on (so far…).
It depends on the input source and the volume you listen at if the sound gets scratchy or starts getting too much reverb/pops.
I've since started using a 5.1 system with DTS decoding amp and don't use the internal speakers anymore (was always going to do amp up, just needed to re route all my cabling (fair bit of fibre, coax and 3.5mm going on behind the buffet).
Sucks to hear about the tuner wolf, I haven't had that problem myself and I have been surfing the channels hard, although I don't watch FTA anymore (just used it to test it out for a week).
One thing I've noticed is that when putting new inputs in, the colour temperature always reverts to 'cool' instead of 'normal' and it took me a few minutes to realise.
It happened on all inputs for me, as though it wants to default to cool temperature and make the colours look flat.
My advice is to have a look at picture menu for all the inputs/source you use and make sure they all say 'normal' and not 'cool'.
The internal speakers aren't very powerful and start to distort easily at moderate levels, especially with surround sound enabled because this mode seems to amplify the sound to much greater levels than when it is disabled. I have a small bedroom and don't need to crank the volume too high so it is sufficient, but if your needs are greater you might want to hook up a sound system.
I might eventually do this but I'm trying to keep my power consumption to a minimum. It helps that the TV is a smart energy saver.
Another person suggested it might be a software bug inside the TV tuner module, don't know how that even occurs :(
Regarding the issue, I will keep monitoring it and will return the set if need be.
Thanks cobalt & wolf! I will turn off the surround sound.. I havent yet connected the old xbox to see how it looks like.. There is provision for a "firmware upgrade", but I cant find any details online about it..
By the way, can someone like this 1 more time, it deserves at least a 100 likes!
"firmware upgrade" is probably a future provision that may never even be utilized by the manufacturer, time will tell if they need to upgrade the firmware or not.
Xbox360 looks glorious in full HD via a HDMI cable. Certainly much better than using a VGA cable through a 16:10 computer monitor!
It would be great if they released a FW update that allows changing the LED backlight brightness rather than the LCD brightness. I want to push those LED lights a little further to pop the whites a bit more. Black level is great though. It only draws 50w and I would like to be able to push those LEDs a little further.
Pity about the games being ~540p upscaled to 1080p. GTA 5 looks worse on the 40" 1080p than the 32" 768p because of all the jaggies and low res textures IMO. I just started my 2nd play through because of this TV.
Looking forward to a PC release and hooking up my computer to the TV and using the 360 controller to my PC though.
The blacks look fabulously deep and dark on this panel, just as they should be. This really enhances the cinema/home movie experience.
A LED backlight adjuster would be a nice feature but they might have intentionally omitted this to comply with the low power rating of this TV and keep it at 5.5 stars. It's quite remarkable how they managed to get the power rating on this TV down to such low levels. My AV receiver alone eats through over 250w of power, and I know the xbox360 is definitely over 100w. However, I generally use my AV receiver for enhanced sound, xbox360 for gaming or PC for other tasks, in conjunction with the TV, which negates any power saving.
The Xbox360 is starting to show its age, soon to be made obsolete by its successor which will output in 1080p natively. I was playing Mass Effect 3 and thought the visuals looked amazing, even if they were upscaled. I am not fussy so much about graphics and am used to running PC games on "low graphic setting", so you get used to the amount of aliasing, blurry textures and flat visuals…but you still enjoy the gameplay experience just the same ;)
Used same photos…we have our culprit & his name is 'Andrew'.
http://www.gumtree.com.au/s-ad/melbourne-region/tv-dvd-playe…
Someone should prank call him and give ridiculous low ball offers for the TV <$100, preferably in a 'foreign' accent ;)
Bogan accent
"Awwwww yer mate, ar-lar giva ya a buck for it, no?"
Just returned one to officeworks chadstone. Picture quality was kind of blury for my liking. Hope someone else gets more out of it than I would have :)
blury? Did you try it on one of the HD channels? Not too sure what you were expecting for $300. I find the quality on par with my $2000 Pana Plasma (2011).
Yep tried HD channels, hooked it up to a WDTV with avi's and mkvs, tried it with a ps3 and a few blu-rays, including Avatar. And an xbox and foxtel. I think my eyes are just too used to the dell monitors and panasonic viera at home. Certainly wasn't expecting 2k quality for $300. In fact it tested better than I expected. Just wasn't used to the motion and colour saturation.
In the end figured someone else would get better use out of it than me so chose to return it rather than hoard it.
Your eyes must be spoilt to goodness. Give this man a 4K TV already ;)
Lol thanks ;). Sorry, I didn't mean to come off as a tool. I've never actually spent more than 1k on a single screen before (including the panasonic viera, which was bought as a factory second).
Who knows why I didn't appreciate it that much. I was trying to warm up to it during the week but kept nitpicking. Reckon I'm just used to different screen calibrations. Although I'm surprised with the above comment finding it on par with a 2011 2k panasonic … my viera on default calibration didn't look anything like that.
But anyway I agree it's still a steal for $300. Well it's refunded, life moves on and I'm happy with that. And happy you guys are satisfied with it.
When I hooked up the screen to my PC and displayed a white background(blank web browser page, I wasn't hunting for dead pixels), to my dismay I found 3 black/dead pixels. Has anyone identified any dead pixels on their panel?
I was extremely careful with the transportation and setup of the TV(I put the panel face down on my soft bed when I was attaching the base support) so I don't think this is my fault but a manufacturing defect. I guess I can live with it as I only notice it with my PC, but I tend to be OCD with dead pixels ;P
I'm afraid we all have a little OCD in all of us…
Source: 1 of 7 billion people with OCD.
:-/
I just ran a program to check (UDPixel) which goes through different solid colour backgrounds at set intervals.
At first I thought I found a stuck red sub pixel, but it turned out to be a fleck of dust.
No dead or stuck pixels here. Sorry to hear about yours. I don't think you would be able to get a refund or exchange as there are usually policies set as to how many dead or stuck pixels a unit is allowed, and even the locations of the pixels in relation to the screen. Might be worth calling up Officeworks and/or Akai to see what can be done if it matters that much to you.
As it's a TV and not a monitor then it wouldn't actually bother me personally. Stuck/dead pixels on a monitor is a whole different kettle of fish than on a TV. On a monitor it's right in your face, you can see it all the time and it drills into your psyche, whereas on a TV the chances are that you would have to get up off the couch/bed to find it.
If I bought a computer monitor with dead pixels I would be highly discriminating and intolerant. On a TV, I can be more relaxed about it because as you said, you don't really notice them. I haven't had much luck with LCD TVs and dead pixels :(
For $300 I can live with it. I'm still really high and mighty over my new panel :)
That UDPixel program is freeware and also has a function that can 'wake up' dead pixels.
Might be worth giving a go for a day to see if it works.
I have tried that particular function but 2 hours wasn't enough and they are still evident. Will give it another go later and report back. I clicked and dragged 3 squares over the 3 dead pixels and continued to use my PC whilst the cycle was running.
Should I use default refresh rate or is there an optimal value?
I cannot find this information about the panel in the specs sheet or online :P
Trying different ones would be good. Some people say to leave it running for 24-48 hours.
I left it running for a few days on a laptop screen that had a stuck blue sub pixel and tried different refresh rates while trying. It never fixed it, but it was worth a shot. At 50 w/hrs its about $0.30 a day to leave it running depending on where you live.
The most amount of information you will find on this panel is in this thread. Search the model number on google for 'AK40LE' from memory and the only informative link is really what you will find on the last bit of page 1 and page 2 here.
Seems that a few other brands share the same model number lol!
Do you think you could use a usb wireless adapter on this? i.e. http://www.ozbargain.com.au/node/122413
I have HDMI on my lappy, more curious what can be done wireless, effectively for media streaming.. (or with the RPi or N40L..) :-) Thanks..
Nope.
If you want wireless streaming for cheap then you should get one of those Android players on an HDMI Stick.
I second that. Or connect your old PC to your TV and run Plex / XBMC.
Thanks guys.. I have a raspberry pi and I had configured wireless on it a while back.. just checking.. foxtel on the tv was great quality, haven't tried any legally downloaded movies yet… thanks again.
Any suggestions for HDMI sticks with Andriod player ??
If you are looking for running XBMC, Mygica ATV520 seems to be a good box (Its not a stick though).
I recommend waiting for an ozbargain deal to pop up for one, that's what I'm doing, and using a laptop in the meanwhile.
what about a WDTV Live Streaming Media Player that is current at officeworks for $99
I went to OW yesterday for an unrelated purchase and discovered that they had received additional stock of this TV and there was literally one unit left!
Scored again, and even persuaded the nice checkout girl to do paywave in $99 amounts which saved me %5 cashback this time around.
Needless to say, I now own two of these superb flat panels :)
Mine has a bright green dead pixel dead centre already.
Dead pixels are black. Green must be a stuck pixel. Did it ship out the box with a dead pixel or did it "develop" one after you used it.
can't say, prob came soon after. noticeable at certain angles.
11 more to go before i get to complain.
Try running UDPixel to fix. See posts above in relation.
Yeah thanks, been running it. Trying all sorts of herbal remedies with magnets and acupuncture and invisible rays.
LOL!
Is it still possible to buy this TV?
I highly doubt your chances. I was extremely lucky to get 2 of them because I found one left at North Parra OW, almost a week after they went on sale, because they received more stock, which sold like crazy naturally.
Well I had no problems in the first few weeks but it started playing up yesterday
Previously it played every single mkv, mp4, avi I threw at it, yesterday , said it didn't support 90% of files I tried to play, it even refused to support a few files it had previously played !!
What could be causing this ?
I was never able to play 264 media.
I always planned on using an HTPC though so it's not a concern for me, but weird how some of us can play it and some can't, and others like yourself had it then lost it.
If you manage to find the fix, please let us know!
Cheers. I ended up buying one before getting the reply though :P