Up close and personal with Zenith's Z17LZ5R 17-inch LCD TV

By Peter Rojas

We managed to get a little up close and personal this past weekend with the Z17LZ5R, Zenith's new 17-inch widescreen high-definition LCD TV, and we have a few initial impressions to share with ya. Read on for the scoop:

Yeah, so it?s not the most attractive TV we?ve ever laid eyes on?it?s got the usual standard silvery plastic thing going on that we?re all sadly accustomed to?but at the end of the day it?s the screen itself you really care about,
right?

List price is $799.95, but you can probably find it for around six hundred bucks if you look around. So what do you get for that? The Z17LZ5R doesn?t come with a built-in HDTV tuner, but hardly any TVs come with ?em anyway, and the display does have an HD-capable resolution of 1280 x 768 pixels (which means the best you?re going to do is 720p).

LG actually builds these displays for Zenith. In recent years they?ve acquired a reputation for making solid,
well-priced flat screen displays, and the Z17LZ5R is no exception. If you want the absolute best in picture quality, no doubt you?ll be better off spending a little more for a Philips or a Sony, but the Z17LZ5R display was more than satisfactory, with little of the ghosting or smearing we?ve noticed on low-end LCD panels. That?s not to say that the specs are top of the line or anything, they?re pretty middle of the road, with a decent brightness of 450 cd/m2, a 400:1 contrast ratio, a pixel response time of 25m, and a wide 178 degree viewing angle (which seems a little exaggerated, to be honest, it seemed more like 170 degrees to us).

You?ll find S-Video, Component Video, coax, and standard video inputs around back, as well as regular RCA audio and PC
audio inputs. No DVI or HDMI inputs, but the Z17LZ5R does come with a VGA port if you?re fixing to connect this up to a PC. Nice to have at least a bit of flexibility, but if you?re planning on using this thing mainly as a computer monitor you?re better off spending your $600 on the 2005FPW,
Dell?s 20-inch widescreen LCD.

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