Why You Can Trust CNET Logik L23IP11 review: Logik L23IP11
We like the 23-inch Logik L23IP11's slim design and Internet and streaming features but not the sluggish remote control or poor audio.
Logik is the own-brand for DSGi, the parent company of Currys, PC World and Pixmania online.
Logik L23IP11
The Good
The Bad
The Bottom Line
Its latest offering is the 23-inch L23IP11, which is an LED TV with built-in support for Internet services such as BBC iPlayer and LoveFilm, as well as USB recording, yet only costs £230.
User interface and EPG
The L23IP11's user interface is pretty basic and lacks the slick animations that you'll find in the menus on Sony or Samsung TVs. However, that's not unexpected on a set with such a low asking price. When you call up the main menu you're greeted by a row of icons across the top for stuff like tuning, picture and audio settings. As you select each one, the screen below populates with the various controls.
The range of picture settings is fairly comprehensive for a small-screen TV. For example in the picture menu, along with the usual stuff like contrast, brightness, colour, sharpness and tint settings, you also get red, green and blue controls, as well as settings for the noise reduction system.
The set's electronic programm guide (EPG) is laid out using a vertical rather than horizontal design. Channels are listed in a box on the right-hand side with the currently playing programme shown on the left. To view what's coming up for the rest of the day on a particular channel, you need to press the blue button on the remote and then switch the view from Time to Channel.
It's a very long-winded way of going about things and quickly becomes annoying. Also, it's worth pointing out that the set only has a Freeview tuner, not Freeview HD, so you can't use it to view channels like BBC One HD or Channel 4 HD.
Digital media and Internet features
Unusually for a budget model, and especially one with a small screen size, the L23IP11 offers a wealth of online and digital media features.
The Internet content is accessed by pressing the i-Player button near the top of the remote. The Internet features take a good while to start up. It's much, much slower to kick in than the Internet platforms found on the likes of Samsung, Sony and LG TVs. Whereas they typically take under 5 seconds to load, on this set it was a full 1 minute and 15 seconds after pressing the i-Player button before the Internet features were ready to be used.
However, it's largely worth the wait, because what's on offer is pretty impressive. There's a good BBC iPlayer app and support for both the LoveFilm and Blinkbox movie rental services. Under the WebTV menu option you'll find a YouTube player along with a Flickr app. This area also gives you access to a number of video podcasts such as CNN Daily and Jamie's Ministry of Food recipes.
The right-hand side of the screen is given over to a box that displays content from widgets including ones for Facebook and Twitter as well as news, sports and weather feeds. It all hangs together nicely and is fairly quick and easy to use.
This Internet menu is also where you'll find the media streaming features for playing video, audio and photo files, from DLNA devices like PCs and NAS drives to hard drives connected to a USB port. It happily played a range of video files, including Xvid and HD MKV files.
The set also offers USB recording. You can either schedule recording via the EPG or just hit the record button while watching a show to immediately start recording it to a USB drive. The recording quality is every bit as good as the original broadcast -- the TV is just saving a raw broadcast stream to disc.
Design and connections
For a TV with a smaller screen size, the L23IP11 is actually quite slim, measuring 30mm deep. Of course, one of the reasons why the set is so slender is that it uses LED backlighting, rather than the CCFL variety you find on chunkier TVs. The chassis is made entirely from plastic, so it doesn't feel quite as well built as some of the sets from mainstream manufacturers.
Nevertheless, it's still a fairly attractive model. We like the way the glossy black bezel has a transparent lip across the bottom and the fact that this design theme is continued on the glass stand, which attaches to the TV via three screws.
The remote is big and chunky and looks a lot like the remote that Sky uses for its HD box. In fact, the remote can even be programmed to work with external Sky boxes. It's relatively comfortable to hold and the soft buttons feel pleasing under your fingers. However, the TV can be sluggish to respond to remote control commands. As a result, you sometimes have to press a button multiple times to get it to properly register with the set, which is annoying.
This TV falls down when it comes to connections. The main problem is that it only has a single HDMI port. Most rival sets of this size manage to pack in two. We'd definitely prefer to have two so you can, for example, have both a games console and a Sky HD box attached at the same time.
That said, you can connect a second HD device via the analogue component inputs, although it's not as good a solution as using HDMI. Both the component and composite connections are mini jacks, so you have to use the supplied break-out cables.
The rear houses a full-sized Scart socket and there's also a VGA input, CI slot and headphone jack.
This model has an Ethernet port for hooking it up to your broadband router and there are three USB ports -- one on the rear and two mounted on the right-hand side. You can add Wi-Fi by buying the £24.99 USB wireless LAN adaptor.
Audio quality
The slimmer chassis means that there's a limited amount of space for the small speakers that are rated at just 3W each. It's hardly surprising then that the set has rather tinny sound, with very little bass troubling the overall mix. It's still fairly loud, but if you push the volume level past 60 per cent, it starts to distort.
Audio controls are limited. There are bass and treble controls as well as a switchable TruSurround HD mode. The latter makes the audio sound brighter, but it doesn't really broaden the sound stage much. On the whole, audio quality is certainly not one of this set's stronger points.
Picture quality
In the past, some of Logik's TVs have suffered from very poor picture quality. Thankfully this model doesn't fall into that trap. While its pictures aren't as refined as some bigger brand TVs, they're not too bad either.
The set uses a full HD panel so it can display high-definition movies delivered from a Sky set-top box or Blu-ray discs. Images produced by the LED backlight are very bright, which adds extra punch to colours.
Perhaps not surprisingly, black levels aren't all that deep. You can see areas at the edges of the screen where the backlight bleeds through. That said, we've certainly seen 23-inch sets that are much poorer performers, both in terms of black levels and backlight consistency.
Although colours tend to be bright and vivid, they can also be unruly at times and throw up the odd hue here and there. You can improve things by tweaking the picture presets, but you can never really get skin tones looking as natural or as realistic as they should.
Nevertheless, standard-definition pictures tend to look crisp -- the small screen size obviously helps with this -- and HD images are razor-sharp too. While it's not going to win any prizes for picture quality, it doesn't disgrace itself either.
Conclusion
The L23IP11's got a slim, attractive design and its Internet and media streaming features are impressive, considering the low price tag. While its picture quality may not be first class, it's perfectly acceptable by budget TV standards.
Nevertheless, we do think that the unresponsive remote control and the tinny audio heavily blot its copybook.