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We’ve already seen in reviews of Sagem’s HD-D45 and Samsung’s SP50L7HXX just how impressive DLP TVs can be when it comes to delivering sheer screen size for your buck. But even those TVs have scarcely prepared us for the almost preposterously attractive proposition offered by Sagem’s HD-D56B. For this TV megalith somehow gives you 56in – yes, that’s 56in – of pictures for just £1,800. Wow. This just has to be too good to be true - doesn’t it?

As you take in the scale of the D56B, you obviously have to accept immediately that it’s not flat like a plasma or LCD TV. But having to accommodate the set’s 600mm rear end is arguably a relatively small price to pay when you think that a plasma TV of a similar size would cost you at least two to three times as much.

And anyway, aside from its butt the D56B does a very good job of making itself look quite small for such a mighty screen. The screen surround is exceptionally slender (as well as being quite glam in its high gloss black finish), and the speaker-bearing subsection is both reasonably diminutive and effortlessly elegant with its silver finish and graceful inward curve.

The D56B’s connections provide the HD Ready standards of a DVI socket and component video inputs. In an ideal world we might have preferred to see an HDMI socket for digital HD duties given DVI’s lack of audio-carrying capability. But it’s not as if it’s hard to get round the DVI audio problems - and some might even argue that DVI sockets are more stable as connectors than their HDMI counterparts.

Elsewhere the connection highlights include a PC input, three SCARTs, and a coaxial digital audio input/output system. Usually this latter jack would point towards the D56B having a built-in digital tuner, but here it’s there to correct potential problems with audio lag, where delays caused by picture processing in digital technology TVs can cause images to appear out of synchronisation with their accompanying sound. Loop your audio through the D56B’s digital jacks, and it will correct any potential synchronisation issues.

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