Vizio VO47L LCD HDTV Review - Controls & Menus

The Vizio VO47L's menu system is exceedingly simple and easy to use, which we like to see. That said there aren't a lot of advanced controls for those who like to play around with the settings a lot. The manual is very good as well.

Ease of Use (7.0)
The VO47L takes a fairly simplistic approach to menus; they are organized into three sections; one for picture, one for audio and the last one for setup controls. This fairly simple approach makes the on-screen menus easy to use; you enter the on-screen menu by pressing the menu button on the remote and navigate with the direction buttons. The OK button in the center of the directional controls selects the current option. The controls themselves are also fairly straightforward; when you select a control such as brightness or backlight, the main menu disappears and a bar appears that shows the

The VO47L on-screen menus are divided into five
sections: Picture, Audio, TV Tuner, Setup and Parental

Picture Controls (5.0)
The Picture menu contains all of the controls for the visual side of things; the standard set of controls (backlight, brightness, contrast, color, tint and sharpness) are here, plus controls of color temperature and a section called advanced video. The color temperature control offers settings called normal, warm, cool and custom. We measured the approximate color temperature settings of the presets as follows:

The custom option allows you to control the level of the red, green and blue components with 255 levels. Unlike some other displays, you don't get any more detailed control than this; you can't access the individual gamma settings or adjust the response curve any further than this.

The custom color temperature settings screen of the
VO47L provides basic controls for red, green and blue

The advanced controls section of the picture menu contains the settings that can be used to tweak the various image processing options of the display.

The advanced video menu, where settings such as
Dynamic Noise Reduction are controlled

The various features on offer here are discussed in the image processing section of the Performance: Viewing Effects page.

Audio Controls (4.0)
The audio controls of the VO47L are a fairly standard set; there are controls for volume, bass, treble and balance, all with a range of 100 steps. There is also a control to enable or disable the Surround sound option and another to disable the built-in speakers completely. For more details of the audio performance of this display, see the audio section of our review.

The audio controls of the VO47L are in a dedicated menu

Other Controls (4.0)
The DTV/TV Tuner setup menu is where you configure the built-in DTV and analog cable tuner. Like all TVs sold in the past few years, the VO47L includes a DTV tuner thant can receive over the air digital TV channels, as well as analog cable channels. It does not, however, support digital cable channels without a seperate cable box. The DTV/TV Tuner menu provides options for setting the type of signal, for searching for and choosing channels and the time zone and daylight saving settings that the TV guide uses.

The DTV/TV Tuner Setup menu is where the incoming
TV signals are configured

The Auto search feature is used to setup and configure the list of received TV channels, either from an analog cable or OTA DTV source. You can either automatically scan for channels automatically, or enter specific channels directly.

The Auto Search feature will automatically scan for DTV
or analog cable signals

The next menu is the setup menu, which contains the other controls that don't fit in elsewhere. From this menu, you can control the language of the menu (only English, Spanish and French are offered), the closed captions style, the picture in picture feature and the position of the screen. You can also do a reset that sets all values back to their factory default.

The Setup menu is the home to the non-image and audio controls

The Setup menu is also home to the picture-in-picture (PIP) controls. The VO47L offers two styles of PIP; one (called PIP) with a small inserted image in the corner, and another with the two videos side by side.

The Setup menu is the home to the non-image and audio controls

Finally, there is the parental control menu. This menu is protected by a pass code, and allows channels to be restricted by channel number or by TV or movie rating. It does not, however, contain any way to restrict viewing hours, and there is no way to make your kids do their homework instead of watching cartoons.

The Parental menu is the home to the viewing restriction controls

Manual (9.0)
The Vizio VO47L's manual does a good job, with large color illustrations, a good table of contents and large headers at the top of each page that make it easy to find what you're looking for. There's even an index in the back, a feature that many TV manuals don't include.