A cheap 24in Full HD LED TV with good picture quality

Grundig's Vanto GLED2407HDC LED TV is reasonably priced for a small-screen TV, and has good picture quality as well as a slim design and good energy efficiency. Unless you have a pressing need for the Internet features offered by new TVs from big brands like Samsung and Sony, we can't see any reason not to buy this TV if you're looking for a small screen in the bedroom or office.

Grundig Vanto GLED2407HDC LED TV: Design, features and power

The materials the Grundig Vanto GLED2407HDC are constructed of feel slightly cheap — the plastic bezel around the screen is a bit tacky and easily picks up fingerprints, for example, and the base of the TV's stand is a simple square of glass — but the TV is solid and doesn't feel flimsy when standing. The stand swivels over a small range. We don't think you'll be using the Vanto GLED2407HDC with a huge range of digital TV devices, but there are single inputs for HDMI, composite, component and VGA. You can also connect a home theatre system via coaxial digital audio. A USB port also allows a small range of media files to be played back, with support for MP3, WMA and JPEG. If you've got a large enough USB memory stick you can also record digital TV and play it back later through the Vanto GLED2407HDC. The Grundig Vanto GLED2407HDC is very light on power — it has the enviable combination of a small screen and efficient LED edge-lighting. According to Grundig, running the Vanto GLED2407HDC for ten hours a day for ten years would only cost $204. At 40W max power consumption it's more efficient than even a laptop computer or incandescent light bulb, so we doubt you'd notice a big impact on your power bill. When we tested the Grundig Vanto GLED2407HDC on a power meter and took an average power reading over an hour of TV, it sat at 37W.

Grundig Vanto GLED2407HDC LED TV: Picture quality

The Grundig Vanto GLED2407HDC is a Full HD 1080p 24in panel, and Grundig quotes a 1000:1 contrast ratio. In practice this means when you're playing a Blu-ray movie or watching an HD digital TV channel, the amount of detail you can see on-screen is impressive. The screen does need a fair bit of tweaking from its default settings to display the best picture quality — we dropped sharpness significantly, as well as lowering brightness and contrast. When we ran through our test Blu-ray movies of The Dark Knight and Terminator: Salvation, we were happy with the amount of detail that could be seen and the colour and contrast of the movies. The screen did struggle a little with the opening scenes of The Dark Knight where pin-pricks of bright white light are contrasted against a deep black background — but this is common to almost all LCD and LED TVs. Apart from this one foible, the Grundig Vanto GLED2407HDC does a good job of displaying video. Only a small amount of detail is lost in especially bright and especially dark areas of the screen.

Grundig Vanto GLED2407HDC LED TV: Conclusion

When we tested the Vanto GLED2407HDC, we thought it had good picture quality as well as good power efficiency. It is reasonably cheap even at its recommended retail price, so if you can find it discounted it's an even better deal.