Haier LTF24Z6

Chinese firm Haier is a heavyweight player in the white goods market, with a wide range of fridges and washing machines.  It's trying to get out of the kitchen and into your front room with its new televisions.  Our first review features the 24Z6, an entry-level 24'' television.  Let's take a closer look.

Build Quality and Design

The first thing to point out is that the Z6 uses a TN display backlit with LEDs around the edges.  This relatively inexpensive display technology is normally used in computer monitors, so you'll have to get used to narrower viewing angles than normal, and a less impressive contrast ratio.

There are just two HDMI ports, a SCART socket, and composite and component video and a coaxial audio output at the back.  There's a USB port at the side, but when we tried to plug in an external hard drive, it wasn't recognised.  We could only get flash memory sticks to work, and the media player could only handly a disappointingly short list of formats: MP4, MOV, MTS and MT2TS.

The onscreen menus are very basic.  We're glad to see that Haier has worked hard to make them look nice, even if it can't really hope to compete with the big boys.  There aren't many options apart from the bare minimum of brightness, backlighting, contrast, sharpness, colour temperature and saturation.

Ghosting and Input Lag

The Z6 is just 33 ms behind our standard reference, a CRT monitor, so it will be a big hit with gamers.  On the other hand, it has an average ghosting time of 15.5 ms, which will put the most demanding gamers off.

Image Quality

We weren't surprised to find the TV in Standard mode when we first switched it on, with a picture that's far too blue and other problems with colour reproduction.


Unfortunately, switching to Film mode did nothing to solve the problem.  The blacks are indistinguishable from greys and colours still look unnatural.  On the other hand, you can improve things by tweaking the settings yourself.  We recommend starting in Film mode, and then adjusting things as follows: brightness: 43; backlighting: 88 and contrast: 52.  The results are noticeably better, and we measured a deltaE of 3.8.  That's not quite perfect, but it's a lot closer than when we started.  Remember, when deltaE falls below 3.0, the remaining colour discrepancies are considered invisible to the naked eye.



Contrast, on the other hand, is much more problematic.  As well as having much narrower viewing angles than average, the Z6 only manages to have a contrast ratio of 750:1, which leaves blacks looking dark grey rather than deep black.

This TV does a reasonably good job of showing films.  The default setting for sharpness is 5, which is a little too much; things are softer and easier on the eye if you turn it down down to 2.  HD content looks perfect, and SD is pretty good too.  The fact you're watching on such a small screen means that the problems with upscaling are much less visible than on a larger screen.

Clouding

Light leaks out in several places around the edge of the screen.  This clouding is caused by the Edge LED backlighting and is particularly annoying when it affects the black bands above and below widescreen films.

Audio Quality

The speakers could really do with more detail: the bass is totally absent, while the mid-range and treble are jumbled.  There's not much chance a  2 x 3 W sound system would do any better though.

Energy Consumption

With just 0.30 W while on standby and 22 W while switched on, the LTF24Z6 is one of the most energy-efficient TVs we have ever tested.