JVC LT-32P679

Ease of Use (3.0)
The JVC LT-32P679's menu system is arranged in a bar with headers that appears at the top of the screen. You use the directional pad to move left and right between the headers. When each is selected a drop down menu appears with all of the available options under each item. Most items can be changed when selected by using left/right on the directional pad. Items with sub menus have a triangle indicating that there are additional items, when you press right while this item is selected the sub menu will appear to the right of the current menu.

We found the interface simple and easy to use, but we do have some issues with the JVC LT-32P679's menu system. The first problem we ran into is the font size of the menus, which is very small. Many users will find it difficult to read from more than five feet away, and those with bad eyesight will probably have to walk right up to the HDTV. Our second problem is that the menu is rather translucent, whcih means you'll be able to see whatever's on the display through the menus, which makes it even harder to read the menus. Thankfully you can change this in the Setting menu, but many people won't realize you can do this and will just suffer with the rather translucent preset.

Picture Controls (4.0)
The Picture menu is the first top-level in the JVC LT-32P679's menu system. There are a lot of items found here, all in a long list. The basics like Tint, Color, Picture, Brightness and Backlight are all near the top. The very first item is called Video Status, and basically allows you to choose between several presets that adjust all the settings for particular situations like Theatre mode. A couple of controls that we would have liked to see that were missing were Contrast and Gamma. The bottom half of the menu has more advanced video features that you can turn on/off. For more infrmation on these options please see our Viewing Effects section. Audio Controls (6.0)
The Sound menu is the fourth heading in the JVC LT-32P679's menu system. The list of options is not as long as the Picture menu, but you still have a good selection of options. The first two options are only available when watching television and allow you to switch between Stereo, Mono or SAP and select the language you want if in SAP mode. There is an option to turn on the simulated surround sound mode, with various options for music, movie, etc. All the remaining menu options allow you to either choose from one of a variety of presets for the equalizer or choose User mode, which allows you to make manual adjustments to the equalizer. Other Controls (5.0)
In addition to the Picture and Sound menus the other top-level menus found on the JVC LT-32P679 are Display, TV, Power and Setting menus. The Display menu allows you to change the label for the current input, access the photo viewer and change the aspect ratio.

The TV menu is used to adjust Closed Captioning, access V-Chip functions and control channel and tuner settings.

The Power menu lets you control the sleep timer and choose the illumination settings for both the power indicator and the illumination that appears behind the TeleDock. If you don't like the blue glow from these you can turn it off entirely.

Finally, the Setting menu lets you control miscellaneous options like date and time, language and, thankfully, adjust the translucency of the menu system. Too bad there's not a font size control too.

Manual (5.0)
The JVC LT-32P679's manual is a typical JVC manual, which means you get black and white, no index and the font is rather small. There are larger headers at the top of each page, which does help make things easier to find, but we don't like it as much as the magazine-like color manuals from manufacturers like Vizio.