One thing I liked about the Olevia's picture adjustments was that the settings could be customized and stored independently for each of the TV's inputs - a huge plus. On the other hand, I was annoyed by the lack of numeric value indicators for the onscreen slider bars. This omission basically means there's no way to record your picture adjustments for later reference if those settings get altered.

Performance With the Olevia's 6500 color-temperature mode active, colors looked mostly natural, although skin tones did have a somewhat hyped-up quality - an effect that could mostly be seen in close-up shots of faces. For example, in a scene from Spider-Man 3 on Blu-ray Disc where Peter (Tobey Maguire) and Mary Jane (Kirsten Dunst) chat in her dressing room after a performance, both actors' skin tones displayed a uniform pinkish cast. To check myself here, I watched another scene where Flint Marko (Thomas Haden Church) and his wife, Emma (Theresa Russell), argue in her kitchen, and I noted the same lack of skin-tone differentiation and the same lean toward pink.

Overall, however, I found the set's color rendition to be reasonably well balanced. I watched a good amount of high-def sports during my time with the Olevia, including the New York Giants' Super Bowl victory and a few soccer and hockey matches stored on my HD cable box/DVR. For both football and soccer, the turf lining the field was a normal-looking green, as opposed to the more lurid hue I've seen when watching sports on a number of other LCD and plasma sets.

The TV's high-def detail was also excellent. In a Spider-Man 3 scene where Peter and Mary Jane visit their friend Harry (James Franco) in the hospital, the texture of the gauze bandage circling his head came through vividly, and I could even make out fine stitching on his pillowcase.

A key area where the Olevia came up short was in its handling of dark, shadowy images. For instance, in an early scene where Peter watches Mary Jane sing onstage, background shadows in the dim concert hall had a pale, dark-gray appearance - an effect that limited contrast and depleted the picture's overall punch. And in a wide shot that encompassed both the stage and the crowd taking in the performance, any shadow detail that might have fleshed out individual concertgoers and added a sense of depth were instead swallowed up in the general gloom.

Another area where the 252T FHD's performance failed to impress was its video scaling and noise reduction - two essential features for making standard-def programs look good on large, high-def screens. While the Olevia passed the film-detail (3:2 pulldown) test on the Silicon Optix HQV evaluation DVD, it came up short on several other tests from that disc used for checking a TV's scaling abilities. And its various noise-reduction settings proved largely ineffective in smoothing out grainy-looking DVDs and analog cable-TV channels. Uniformity was average for an LCD, with picture contrast falling off steeply at viewing angles greater than 15º off-center, and slight screen clouding was visible on some programs.

Bottom Line Olevia's 252T FHD isn't the best LCD HDTV I've tested. The set's middling black depth and shadow detail and its so-so video processing cause the TV to pale next to many recent top-shelf LCDs, including those in Olevia's own 7 Series line. What the 252T FHD does have going for it is a crisp high-def picture, rich color, and flexible picture-adjustment options. And then there's the matter of its price: Shop around, and chances are you can score a great deal on a 252T FHD. Just remember to enlist a very strong friend to help you lift it out of the box!