Black Boxes: Sampo America LME-17S1 17" LCD TV/Monitor

by Charles Fulton
Winter 2002/Spring 2003

COMPANY: Sampo America
CONTACT: (626) 336-1236
WEB SITE: www.sampoamericas.com
PRICE: $1,199

If you are looking for a "smart" TV set for a room where space is at a premium, the new LME-17S1 17-inch LCD TV/monitor from Taiwan-based Sampo is worth a look. This skinny-mini provides an unusually generous amount of video inputs for an LCD-based display – on a par with what we'd expect from a good 32-inch NTSC TV, but also includes an RGB input to accommodate a computer or ATSC (digital TV) tuner.

Pick An Input, Any Input
The LME-17S1 can display practically any video signal, certainly everything we threw at it. You can attach RF, composite video, S-video and component video signals. The unit's RGB input accommodates a computer or a DTV tuner.

Video Testing
We put S-video into the LME-17S1 from a TiVo. The graphic animations and overlays tended to submarine a bit, but they snapped into place. We picked an episode of The Simpsons from TiVo's Now Playing screen, the colors were vibrant and the motion was fluid.

Component video from a Samsung DVD player was also beautiful, using Video Essentials, Avia, Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season 2 as source material. The LCD handled the full range of contrast contained in the Video Essentials test signals.

Avia's contrast-setting pattern, as well as the THX white-box pattern, showed us that the whites displayed on the LCD weren't thresholding, even with contrast set at 100 percent. That is to say, there was a noticeable difference between full white and the white that was slightly less than full white, and that's the way it should be.

With Avia, we discovered that with blue set properly, the color accuracy was very good: red was perfect, something we've not seen in a long time, and green was only slightly less than it should have been. The panel doesn't have traditional television tint controls, but it did have white balance presets to control color temperature. The SMPTE bar pattern on Video Essentials showed that it was already perfectly set by default.

One of the advantages of the LCD is that power supply capacity isn't a problem, so bright scenes don't cause geometric distortion (a needle-pulse pattern was perfectly vertical, something we don't always experience.)

A pixel-cropping pattern from Avia showed that somewhere between the DVD player and the display, about 20 pixels were cropped from the top and bottom. However, most TVs tend to mask larger portions of the screen.

We tried the LME-17S1 on a Power Macintosh G3 and the display was gorgeous. It cropped about four rows of pixels from the top and bottom, but we really didn't miss anything. Unfortunately, we couldn't find an adjustment for vertical size on its menus.

Audio
The set plays audio from the RF input, and each video input has a set of stereo audio inputs. The RGB input has a stereo mini-plug audio input. The speakers are small, and provided reasonably good midrange and treble, but rather poor bass. The bass, treble and balance controls are a nice touch.

Almost Perfect
With the full complement of video inputs, the LME-17S1 is a versatile display with a fantastic picture, ready for HDTV. Pricey compared to tube televisions, but a good value, considering its excellent picture quality and its outstanding versatility.

SMART SPECS