Finlux 32F8072-T: Sound Quality

Small budget TVs traditionally struggle in the audio department, and the 32F8072- T doesn’t manage to buck this trend. There’s practically no bass presence to its soundstage at all, which inevitably leaves film soundtracks feeling thin, weedy and unconvincing. Male voices sound a bit wimpy too and can sometimes cause the speakers to distort slightly, while female voices, high parts of a film score and some treble-rich soundstage details all tend to sound shrill and harsh.

The set just about holds its together sonically for normal news/chatroom style broadcasts, but anything tougher than that and your ears can expect a bit of a battering.

Other Points to consider

If you’re thinking of the 32F8072-T as a potential budget gaming screen, you’ll be pleased to hear that using its Game picture preset it only takes the screen around 33ms to render pictures after receiving image data at its inputs. This means there’s minimal chance of the TV causing you any unnecessary deaths while playing the likes of Call of Duty. The downside to this, of course, is that you’ll only have yourself to blame.

As you would expect of a budget TV, the 32F8072-T’s operating system is pretty mundane. The remote is a bog-standard, plasticky affair aside from the odd but actually quite comfortable way it curves forwards at its sides, and the set up onscreen menus are bland in the extreme – despite Finlux attempting to glam things up by using a curious yellow menu colour that we suspect is supposed to resemble gold…

The level of presentation jumps a bit for Finlux’s Smart Hub menu, though, and it’s pleasing to find that you can move this hub’s content icon links around on the screen to give your favourite services a preferential position. This could come in very handy in the (admittedly unlikely!) event that Finlux gets enough services onto its Smart TV platform to take up more than a single page of content ‘slots’.

Should I buy a Finlux 32F8072-T?

From a pure AV quality perspective it’s hard to recommend the Finlux 32F8072-T when you consider that you can at the time of writing get the vastly superior Samsung UE32EH5000 for exactly the same £280 asking price.

The only thing that might save the 32F8072-T is the fact that it offers DLNA and online functionality while Samsung’s model does not, but we’d favour using a games console or a cheap third-party streaming box if you can. If you don’t have the former then the latter won’t cost much, the Now TV box is just £10 while the Roku LT adds LoveFilm and Netflix for only a small amount more.

SEE ALSO: Best TVs under £300

Verdict

With the likes of Samsung and Toshiba showing ever more willingness to get down and dirty at the budget end of the TV market, Finlux is going to have to work a bit harder with its picture quality than it does with the 32F8072-T if it wants to keep treading on its rivals’ more established toes.

Trusted Score