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The ViewSonic is the cheapest TV on test, but unfortunately it lives up to that fact in almost every respect. Obviously styling is a matter of personal taste, but in my opinion the ViewSonic is the least visually impressive of the trio. The majority of the case is finished in matt silver, while the screen is surrounded by a dark grey bezel – it’s not ugly I suppose, but it’s certainly not pretty either.

Like the Rock, the ViewSonic has its speakers housed in a bar beneath the screen, making the actualy panel look larger than the Evesham’s even though it isn’t. Unfortunately the speakers in the ViewSonic are, quite simply apalling. I’ve heard better sound out of a notebook than I managed to get from these speakers. It’s almost as if there are no bass drivers whatsoever, and if I try and force some bass via the OSD, the result is just muffled sound rather than adding any real low end frequency. Thoughtfully ViewSonic has included a headphone socket on the right side of the speaker bar – you’re going to need this!

Of course if the image quality was really good, I could fogive the terrible sound quality, but unfortuantely it’s not. In fact the image quality on the N3260W is, in some ways, worse than the sound quality from its internal speakers – not what you expect when buying a shiny new high definition television.

To be fair, the image quality on the ViewSonic was acceptable via its HDMI input. Both the HDMI enabled Media Center PC and DVD player produced a reasonable image on the N3260W, but that’s where the good news ends. Hooking up the Xbox 360 via component video produced a truly horrendous image that looked like it was heavily compressed, even though it actually wasn’t. There was a massive amount of ghosting around text and characters in games, while the colours were nowhere near the shades that they should have been.

I also hooked up a Freeview box to a SCART socket to evaluate standard definition digital television, but the picture quality here was very poor too. Watching Wimbledon, the players visibly shimmered, while pretty much everything was surrounded by a distracting ghost like outline. It looked like the image processing in the ViewSonic just couldn’t upscale standard definition to the 1,366 x 768 resolution of the panel convincingly, resulting in a very badly rendered image.

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