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In the Rock’s defence, it did manage to produce a better picture via its integrated analogue tuner than the ViewSonic, but that’s no great feat and I still wouldn’t recommend using it. Using high definition sources provided a big improvement, with the Xbox 360 looking good, but still not as good as it looked on the Evesham.

HDMI performance was a bit hit and miss. The Rock resolutely refused to even display a proper image from our HDMI enabled Media Center PC, instead all I got was a garbled mess, despite the fact that the other two screens had no issue with this source. A bit of further investigation revealed that the Rock had a problem with a 720p source – if I hooked up the upscaling DVD player and set the output to 1080i the image was perfect, flick it to 720p and it started to shake and judder. Now, considering an HD Ready TV needs to be able to accept both 720p and 1080i signals over its HDMI port, it looks like Rock has a bit of tweaking to do.

Like the other screens on test, the Rock sports a resolution of 1,366 x 768, which conforms to the HD Ready specification. Rock also quotes a contrast ratio of 1000:1 which is identical to the Evesham, despite the fact that the contrast on the Evesham is significantly better. The price of the Rock is also identical to the Evesham (£699), but having looked at both screens next to each other, I’d definitely take the Evesham over the X-TV.

Verdict

The Rock is a far better HDTV than the ViewSonic. The design is pretty good if you ignore the speaker bar, but not only do the speakers spoil the look, the external loose wire connection makes this feel like a cheap TV.

I can’t fault Rock for the amount of connection options on offer – this really is a TV that has enough room to connect all your PC and AV equipment to, although I don’t quite understand why there are composite and S-Video outputs in evidence.

Unfortunately the picture quality is disappointing, with the washed out image robbing high definition footage of its rich, vivid and lifelike colours. And making matters worse the narrow viewing angle compounds this problem. Add to this the fact that the HDMI implementation isn’t quite right and it’s clear that Rock’s first foray into the HDTV market needs a little work.

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