Kogan 1080P-32 LCD television

Kogan’s 1080P-32 is a good mid-size LCD television for a budget buyer. It has picture quality good enough to enjoy Blu-ray movies, although you’ll need a separate sound system to really get the most out of them.

As with the majority of Kogan’s televisions, the company hasn’t spent much money on a pretty chassis. It’s matte black and squarish with a wide stand — in a word, functional. More important is the connectivity offered. Kogan touts two HDMI ports as a selling point, while component, composite, S-Video and VGA ports round out analog connections.

Kogan boasts that the 1080P-32 panel is produced by LG, and the specifications aren’t too bad at first glance. A dynamic contrast ratio of 10,000:1 certainly isn’t bad by budget standards, and it has a 178 degree viewing angle. We ran the television through its paces with a series of DVD-quality and Blu-ray 1080p movies. Our DVD content was smoothly upscaled, and plenty of detail was displayed. The reasonably high dynamic contrast ratio (for a traditional CCFL LCD television) revealed image detail in the dark scenes in the beginning of The Dark Knight, but the lack of local dimming caused detail to be lost in high-contrast scenes that featured bright white and dark black areas on-screen simultaneously.

The Kogan 1080P-32's speakers are acceptable for watching broadcast television, but they aren't great for listening to dialogue in movies and vocals in music. They’re rated at 10W each but we found considerable distortion at higher volumes, so if you intend to watch movies or listen to music then an external sound system is almost a necessity.

The inclusion of a 100Hz mode is advantageous for watching fast-motion content. The fast pans of our test wildlife documentary footage were rendered with only a small amount of motion blur and jitter visible. While this system isn’t as advanced as some of the others we’ve seen in the televisions of Sony and Samsung it’s better than nothing.

Kogan’s 1080P-32 is a very reasonably priced LCD television. Compared to the budget competition of the Hisense HL81V68P it’s a bargain.