LCD TV Reviews

User Interface
The remote is much like previous generations of JVC TV remotes. It's fully illuminated and universal, with the ability to control up to five devices including the TV. It has dedicated input-selection buttons—yea!—but they are labeled V1-V5, so you must remember which is which.

A ring of curved buttons around the central cursor cluster is a bit confusing—it's easy to push one of these buttons instead of the cursor-navigation buttons. A few function buttons bring up certain controls, such as aspect ratio and video and audio status, without having to go through the menu system. The Aspect button is particularly important because of the TV's constant reversion to the Full mode as discussed in the Features section.

The menu system is much improved over previous generations of JVC TVs. Instead of one long series of pages, the controls are now organized into logical submenus. Not only that, entering the menu system returns to the submenu you last left, which is great. Also, the picture menu reveals the values of the picture controls at the topmost level.

When you select a picture control to adjust, it drops to the bottom of the screen and the rest of the menu disappears, which is as it should be. However, the menu reappears after only five seconds of inactivity, which is too little time to carefully consider your setting.

Six picture modes—called Video Status in JVC-speak—include two user memories, and all six are fully adjustable. On the downside, the picture controls are tied to these modes, not the inputs, so the same picture-control values are applied to all inputs to which a given picture mode is assigned. To optimize the picture controls for each input, you must adjust the controls in a different picture mode.